Welcome to Madison’s Footnotes, the substack page for the Madison’s Notes podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
In preparation for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, it would be wise to look back at the ancient thinkers and writers who helped inspire its early leaders. Perhaps the preeminent role model was the Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero. So here in Episode 11 of Season 5, I interview Michael C. Hawley to talk about the political philosophy of Cicero and his influence on the American Republic.
Michael Hawley is an assistant professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow with the James Madison Program, he wrote the book, Natural Law Republicanism: Cicero’s Liberal Legacy (2022). Now, he’s working on a new one, Preaching to the Choir: The Rhetoric of Prophets, Reformers, and Demagogues.
Drawing on his book, we discuss how Cicero crafted a theory about the Roman Republic as it was falling apart, but which grew in influence throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. As Cicero’s writings like On the Republic, On the Laws, and On Duties formed a tradition in rivalry to the followers of Machiavelli’s realpolitik, his moral-political thought became a touchstone for political liberty, especially with John Locke and many of the American Founding Fathers.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Please enjoy.
Professor Hawley, welcome to Madison’s Notes.
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
How did you get into political theory and intellectual history, and how’d you get into Cicero?
Actually, I got into them in the reverse order, so I got into Cicero a little bit before I got into political theory.
In high school, I went to a school called Roxbury Latin, which, as the name might suggest, requires that its students learn Latin, and it was there I first encountered Cicero in the form of his speeches, and I really fell in love with him his use of language and his political ideas. I looked past the way he’s obviously full of himself, but I didn’t expect to spend a lot more time with him.
And then I went to undergraduate, where I ended up falling in love with political theory. Political theory, as I discovered it, captured everything that had excited me about school up to that point. It’s about how we ought to live with each other and what the purpose of life is. It also involves reading great books. It involves teasing out mysteries of individual thinkers’ thought. And so I set off on a course to do political theory with my life, not thinking that much about Cicero at the time.
Then in the middle of my graduate school years, I happened to take a graduate level course on Cicero’s political thought. At the same time, I was taking a course on Enlightenment political theory, and it started to occur to me that Cicero was everywhere in the Enlightenment, and that his ideas were cropping up in the thought of people like Adam Smith and Kant and John Locke.
It started to dawn on me how much of the modern world is indebted to Cicero, and then it further occurred to me that no one seemed to have noticed this, and that’s exactly what you’re looking for in a dissertation project: something that you think is true that people haven’t noticed. And so I was off to the races there.
Where did you do your undergraduate work, and your graduate work?
I did my undergraduate work at Tufts University; and I did my PhD at Duke University, which is the hated nemesis of my current employer, UNC Chapel Hill.
Tell me a bit about Cicero—the most prolific author in all of classical antiquity, at least Latin letters.
It’s true. Cicero is not a modest man. He in fact wrote an epic poem about his own consulship. Let’s take a step back. Cicero is a Roman statesman and philosopher, who lived at the very end of the Roman Republic. Cicero’s death almost precisely corresponds to the death of the Roman Republic.
It’s anachronistic to say this, but his story is a bit of an American story in that he does not come from an old political family. He’s what the Romans called a novus homo, a new man. And so he rose from relative obscurity from a family out in the boondocks to the highest post in the Roman Republic—that of consulship—on the merits of his own talent and hard work, especially as an orator, a pleader of cases in the law courts.
During his consulship, he—by his own account, but also by the accounts of many others—saves the Roman Republic from an attempt to overthrow it: the great Catilinarian conspiracy.
Was it real?
We have quite a lot of evidence that suggests it was real. Is it possible Cicero may have exaggerated the threat slightly so as to embellish his own contributions to the Republic? That seems to me not implausible.
I think one of the things that’s worth exploring in Cicero’s thought is it’s not entirely clear—despite the fact that Cicero does put the conspirators to death strikingly without a trial—that Cicero’s own philosophic thought is pretty hostile to that action.
But Reece Edmends is probably right that there were very good circumstantial arguments for the political necessity of putting to death these people who, if the reports are accurate, were really in danger of completely overthrowing the Republic. Was it absolutely necessary? Probably not. Might it have been prudent? I think there’s a decent case to say that it was.
Plutarch seems to agree with Cicero’s necessity. At the same time, he notes that the one dissenting voice in the Senate to not execute the conspirators was Julius Caesar, and that Plutarch faults Cicero for not taking advantage of an event around the same time when he could’ve taken Caesar out very quickly.
Plutarch can have that kind of complaint in hindsight. At the time, it wasn’t as clear that Caesar was the threat he was going to pose. It’s in fact worth looking at that debate. Caesar makes a fairly compelling case for why it would be contrary to Roman principles to execute the prisoners. In fact, Caesar’s argument looks like it’s going to win the day until some other senators like Cato get up there and make a more forceful case for their execution. But I’m inclined to give Cicero a pass on not executing Caesar then.
He did have a chance to join the First Triumvirate, but it would have violated his philosophical principles. Do you think that was a wise decision?
In terms of wisdom—and if one considers prudence the actions that will lead to one having a long life—then probably not. But it’s one of the things that I think contributes to Cicero’s philosophic and political legacy that he turns down the Triumvirate.
It makes it easier to construe Cicero as a martyr to republicanism because he was offered this opportunity to join the Triumvirate, which was an extra constitutional alliance by three powerful Romans, including Julius Caesar, that he turns it down on the grounds that it is contrary to the constitution of the Roman Republic.
By the way, while Cicero is engaged in all of this political activity, he is also an extremely prolific philosophic writer, as well as a letter writer (a correspondent to his friends). It is, I think, the combination of his political career, his devotion to and eventual death for Republican principles, and his philosophic output that made him such an influential figure in the history of political thought.
To nail down the events of his life: he’s one of the first people to be consuls who had not had a military background. He’s in the Senate for multiple decades as one of the more famous orators. He is an extreme opponent of Mark Antony, and some of his last speeches in the Senate are speaking out against Antony, and those are called what?
The Philippics, which is a confusing name for people to encounter them, because Mark Antony’s name isn’t Philip. They’re inspired by a series of speeches given by the Athenian statesman Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon. The analogy that Cicero meant to call out is that once again we have a government that is threatened by the rise of monarchy, essentially.
But yes, the crucial dates of Cicero’s life: he rises from relative obscurity on the basis of being this extremely powerful orator. His speeches go on to become the standard for Latin eloquence, basically for the rest of history, as long as there is something called Latin eloquence.
For students when they’re first learning Latin, Julius Caesar’s text on The Gallic War is very crisp, very clear. However, Cicero’s works (especially his speeches) are extremely complicated. You can go a whole paragraph until you finally get to the last word of it, which is the one verb.
Which gives you the key to understanding the rest of the sentence. Yes, Cicero’s style is often called the “Grand Style.” It’s quite ornate. His sentences are extremely complicated.
Anyone who’s learning Latin will usually, when they first encounter real Latin—as you say, Latin that was written historically—Julius Caesar is a usual start. He gives good, concise military prose, and then you encounter Cicero, whose prose is not that of a military man.
Especially towards the end of the republic, Cicero is fairly unique in having his political power be based neither in military success nor in fabulous wealth. It really is political merit that leads Cicero to rise. And he is deeply involved in the series of crises that lead to the collapse of the Roman Republic. He was not involved in the assassination of Caesar.
But once Caesar is executed, especially in the city of Rome after many of the conspirators flee, Cicero becomes the leader of the senatorial faction in Rome, and in that capacity, he finds himself opposing Caesar’s old lieutenant, Mark Antony, and giving those speeches, the Philippics.
They so enrage Antony that he forms his alliance with Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, in the Second Triumvirate (an inheritor of the principle and organization of the first), which becomes this surprising alliance between Mark Antony, Octavian, and yes, Lepidus, as the third wheel.
The Ringo Starr.
Exactly. Antony insists that Cicero be among the first of their opponents to be extrajudicially assassinated. He’s so angry at these speeches that Cicero gave that he has Cicero’s head cut off, his hands cut off, and both placed on the roster, which was the place in Rome where these speakers would address the crowd. At least some historians report that Mark Antony’s wife was so enraged by the speeches which Cicero gave that she also had his tongue pulled out and stabbed it repeatedly with a pin.
If you’re going to judge a man by his enemies, Cicero would be judged well. But it’s his death that helps cement his legacy. Unlike Socrates who died in Athens for philosophizing, Cicero dies as a politician, more of a political martyr standing for certain practical principles than a philosophical one.
Socrates in many ways helps kick off a great tradition of moral and political philosophy in the West, and it’s not coincidental that he’s executed for his commitment to that philosophy. In his trial, he says, “I would rather die than give up philosophy.” And Athens takes him up on that offer.
“We agree.”
Exactly. Athens goes, “That’s an acceptable deal to us.”
Cicero, on the other hand, while he was a very serious philosopher and considered himself, in fact, a follower of Plato and Socrates, it’s not for his philosophy that he’s executed. It’s for his political commitment to Roman republicanism. Whatever else one might say about Cicero, one cannot really get away from the fact that he was to his core a committed patriot to the Roman Republic.
Plutarch writes that Octavian, who became the Emperor Augustus (and whom we covered with Reece Edmends), discovered that his grandson was secretly reading Cicero. His grandson feared his grandfather’s wrath, but instead Augustus then takes his text and reads it aloud, saying that he was “a learned man and a lover of his country.”
It’s quite a surprising revelation if true, which we really only have one source for this. But Augustus had consented to Cicero’s execution, and in fact had presided over the real final nail in the coffin to the Roman Republic, so his grandson had some reason to be afraid that his grandpa was not going to like him reading this book.
But even the plausibility of the story goes to suggest how quickly Cicero’s philosophic political legacy becomes rehabilitated, even once the republic he devoted his life to was gone. So even in the successor state, the state that has every reason to downplay the importance of the martyrs to republican rule, Cicero is pretty much immediately rehabilitated, and placed in the center of philosophical, rhetorical, and to a certain extent, moral-political thought.
What are some of his main writings?
We have tons of writing from Cicero.
How many volumes?
100 might be strong, but there are definitely dozens. Most of those are filled with Cicero’s correspondence to his friends. He was a frequent letter writer, but not only to his friends. He had this actually very touching and close relationship both with his first wife and with his daughter, the death of whom really sent him into a deep depression.
We have tons of his correspondence. We also have tons of his speeches, which were preserved in large part because they were considered to be the model for literate Latin. And then we have a series of political philosophic works, some of which exist only in incomplete form in fragments, and others of which we have whole.
Probably the most important of these, at least historically speaking, is a book in Latin called De Officiis, which means On Duties. Cicero also wrote a work called De Republica and another called De Legibus, which in Latin would be On the Republic and On the Laws and are both at least ever so slightly inspired by Plato’s works of the same names.
In fact, it’s thanks to Cicero that we refer to Plato’s magnum opus as The Republic. The Greek word is “politeia,” which doesn’t necessarily mean republic. But Cicero, as he tries to translate Greek philosophy into Latin, decides that “res publica” is the best corresponding term for what Plato is getting at, and so ever thereafter we call Plato’s work “The Republic.”
So we have On Duties, we have On the Laws, we have On the Republic. He writes a work On Friendship. He writes a series of works on what we would now probably call something like metaphysics. He writes a book called On the Nature of the Gods.
That is responsible for a far majority of what we know about the pagan religion of classical antiquity.
Yes. It is wildly informative about that. Cicero is actually often treated as the key text to figuring out all sorts of things from the classical pagan world, including the works of philosophers who have been lost, especially Stoic thinkers and Epicurean thinkers. And then Cicero also writes a series of works on the theory and practice of rhetoric, which also go on to set a tone for how one thinks about how one uses words to move people.
It’s a trifecta from the ancient world. Obviously, there are stories about Demosthenes in which he put pebbles in his mouth to teach himself how to speak well. But you have Aristotle’s Rhetoric, then you have Cicero’s writings, then eventually you have Quintilian’s Institutes, which would be a century or two later.
Yes. And Quintilian both acknowledges that he follows in Cicero’s footsteps in a certain way, but also shifts the rhetorical tradition in ways that you might expect, given that he’s discussing rhetoric in a political community in which decisions are no longer being made by the political community. When that’s the case, the role of rhetoric in your society is going to shift substantially. To compare Cicero’s ideas about what rhetoric can do to Quintilian’s is actually quite an interesting project in its own right.
Now, what were the core texts that you were drawn to in your PhD?
So I spent probably most of my time with On Duties, On the Republic, and On the Laws. On the Republic is a particularly tricky one since it is one of those texts which we have only in fragments. Those fragments have actually been accumulating over the years, so a huge chunk of the text was only discovered at the beginning of the 19th century on a palimpsest, which is to say someone had written over it and on the back of the text, and someone pulled it out and discovered that underneath this we have a big chunk of one of the most famous missing works of antiquity.
I spent most of my time on those because my interest as the project developed started to concentrate around Cicero’s fundamental political ideas. And those are most clearly expressed in those texts, and then in a handful of particularly important speeches that he gives, which also help elucidate his understanding of, the nature of politics.
The first time I read Cicero was in high school. We had some selections from On the Republic, such as the “Debate on Injustice,” and then the “Dream of Scipio.”
In the “Debate on Injustice,” Cicero is adding his own spin to the debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. Here he gives a case that there is only one justice, universal and everywhere, at all times and all places, instead of multiple varying standards in different contexts.
Then in the “Dream of Scipio,” is Cicero’s own twist on the Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic. In the dream, Scipio Aemilianus has a vision of the cosmos, and is told from his grandfather Scipio Africanus that this whole Roman Empire is a tiny speck on a very small planet. He is further told, however, his duty and his place as a Roman is part of this larger cosmic harmony.
Can you tell me a bit about these two sections?
Something that’s worth backfilling here is that some of Cicero’s philosophic works are written in his own voice. De Officiis is like this. It’s Cicero saying clearly what he thinks.
A letter to his very prodigal son who’s out in Athens partying too much instead of studying.
Yes. His son is a little bit disappointing, but is essentially off at college, you might say.
De Republica is different. De Republica, like many of Plato’s works, is a dialogue among a number of different characters. It’s a response to Plato’s Republic, but the debate about justice is also inspired by real-life event in Rome. A half a century before the work is written, a Greek philosopher named Carneades came to Rome and put on a demonstration of what Greek philosophic learning could do.
On the first day of his demonstration, he gave this powerful, persuasive, and impassioned speech on behalf of justice. And everyone was really impressed and thought, “Oh, what a great guy.” Then the next day, he got up and gave an even more powerful and persuasive speech on behalf of injustice, and this really freaks the Romans out.
Cato the famous Roman Stoic wanted to just ban philosophers entirely from Rome after this. And Cicero’s quite moved by, this event and what he does is essentially flip the script on The Republic. He gives injustice the first word, and it does come across as very persuasive, and then justice gets the last word and seems to triumph.
Though what is particularly frustrating for people like me is that very debate is itself fragmentary, so we don’t have the full thing, and we don’t entirely know exactly how it ends. But it’s true that justice, as it’s defended by its spokesperson in the dialogue, is a universal justice that applies to all people at all times in all places.
It’s not a Roman justice. It’s not a Greek justice. It’s just justice simply. That idea becomes very central to Cicero’s political thought. But it’s also tied to the second segment of the dialogue you described, which is the famous dream of Scipio.
So here in the dialogue, Scipio (who’s probably the main character) describes a dream he has in which he surveys the whole of the universe. He discerns in the universe and in the movement of the spheres, planets, and the heavenly bodies, a great cosmic harmony that is achieved by the Supreme Being. That cosmic harmony is meant, I think, in part to A) indicate that the universe as a whole is rational and ordered, from which a whole host of subsequent philosophic ideas would follow. It also gives B) a model to individuals to try to harmonize themselves.
But then you’re right: it gives this interesting perspective to Scipio about the Roman state to which he is so devoted. On the one hand, it is from the cosmic perspective. Rome is just a tiny dot on a tiny dot. Carl Sagan, the physicist, has the “pale blue dot”—the perspective-taking that one can get from a long-distance view of the Earth, that all the things we all get so anxious, upset, angry, or hopeful about are all confined to this cosmically microscopic, little speck. Cicero was, about two millennia ahead of Carl Sagan on that, and he didn’t even have the advantage of space flight and telescopes to be able to get this sense, because that’s precisely the point that he makes.
And yet at the same time, Scipio admits that despite the wonders of the cosmos, his eyes are still drawn back to the tiny dot on the tiny dot where Rome is at. That seems to suggest that human beings do have this inborn longing for a rootedness or a groundedness, a love of one’s own and of one’s home. The message of the Dream of Scipio does not appear to be that one should entirely divest oneself of that, that one should become purely a citizen of the cosmos, or that one should become completely indifferent to the things of one’s home or to human things in general.
The reason is that Scipio is told by his grandfather, who’s nevertheless been able to channel the wisdom of the cosmos, that the Supreme Being views human political societies as almost literal microcosms of the great cosmos. They are small cosmoses in which we have an opportunity to bring something that resembles the cosmic harmony into reality for ourselves. And so it is perhaps the worthiest human task to maintain, sustain, and found (if necessary) such political communities.
In fact, Scipio is left with this very difficult, philosophically and morally necessary tension between recognizing the ultimate insignificance of our political communities and nevertheless maintaining a kind of devoted service to them. As far as we know, that is where De Republica ends. There have been scholars who suggest that the work continued after that, but I am of the opinion that it makes much more sense to imagine the work ending there. It would fit with the parallel to Plato’s Republic, which ends with the vision that Er has of the afterlife. It’s a very high note to end on exactly.
Cicero is not writing systematically in the same way Aristotle is on specific subjects. You have to coalesce the writings that he was doing on the side while he was a statesman and put them together. Some of these premises would include that the political regime is the mixed regime, and that the good regime or a just regime depends upon the consent of the people.
Here Cicero is atypically ancient and prototypically modern, which would appeal much more to us instinctually as Americans. Can you tell me a bit about some of these almost proto-modern leanings in his ancient thought?
It may help to link what we were just talking about to this discussion, maybe in the following way. This cosmic vision that Cicero says one could get from something like the Dream of Scipio is partly what grounds his claim that justice is universal, right?
If it is the case that the Supreme Being governs the whole cosmos a way that is at least analogous to a political community, one of the upshots of that account is that regardless of what local political community you belong to, all human beings are co-citizens of this great cosmopolis of gods and men, which is an idea that’s taken from Stoic political thought.
Cicero seems to believe that the ordered harmony of the universe by the superintendence of a Supreme Being over all of us together make it so that all human beings are in a relationship to each other as (at least in an attenuated way) co-citizens. This in turn grounds a series of duties and obligations that we have to each other, which he does start to articulate in these political philosophical writings that he works on usually when he is experiencing some kind of forced hiatus from politics.
In the many crises that Rome experienced, sometimes Cicero’s on the losing side and finds he has to withdraw from politics. It’s generally then that he writes these works. For instance, De Officiis is written, in fact, in the last four weeks of Cicero’s life, while he’s both trying to resuscitate the republic, but also trying to evade Antony.
In these works, though he is not a systematic thinker, one can work out certain systematic steps that he takes: he has this vision of a universal cosmopolis in which all human beings are co-citizens.
And individual polities reflect a microcosm of the cosmopolis.
Yes, or ideally should. So the cosmopolis is a good political community, and a res publica we might literally translate “a commonwealth.” That is to say, it’s the public thing. One might even translate it as “the public wealth.”
And this is the only type of just regime, correct?
Yes.
For Aristotle, there are different kinds of just regimes that have their own perverted versions, so polity and kingship and aristocracy. They have their value, and they have their deformations, and the best one is a mix of all of them. However, for Cicero, there’s only one good type.
Yes, though Cicero does admit that you can have a monarchical res publica. You can also have a more aristocratic res publica. But the ideal form of a res publica is this mixed regime. It will turn out, at least according to Cicero in De Republica, the really only practically and possibly just version of this res publica is a mixed one. It partakes of some elements of monarchy, some elements of aristocracy, and some elements of democracy.
The question of what makes something just, though, is also relevant here. Cicero’s fairly clear in De Officiis what he thinks justice is, and he also sounds quite modern. If one were to look at Plato or Aristotle, you’ll find them talking about different forms of justice, including what you might call distributive justice.
A just society is one in which people who are wiser, or who contribute more to the society, or who are otherwise meritorious, should get more both in terms of wealth, but much more salient are questions of political power and honor. The best people should have the most power and the most honor. And justice, therefore, is distributive in this way that a good society places the best people at the top, the middling people in the middle, and the less good people at the bottom.
One looks in vain for a vision of justice like that in Cicero. Cicero insists in De Officiis that the first point about justice is that you don’t hurt other people, which sounds an awful lot like what we mean by justice when we think of things like the justice system. It’s a way of correcting for when someone has hurt or stolen or otherwise violated what belongs to the person of someone else. Cicero says, “Okay, so justice is reflected in the fact that we are all co-citizens of this cosmopolis, so if you hurt someone else, you have violated justice.”
Also, if you take their stuff, if you appropriate to yourself property that belongs to someone else, you have violated justice. And then the third step Cicero takes in accounting for justice is to say, also, if you sit by while someone else commits injustice, you too are committing injustice. This vision of justice Cicero fairly explicitly says applies to all human beings everywhere.
One of the interesting upshots is that it eliminates the category of the natural slave, which is a concept one can encounter in Aristotle. It’s debated among scholars to what extent Aristotle meant that, but Cicero is pretty explicit. There is no such thing as natural slavery. Now, this doesn’t turn him into an abolitionist. Cicero himself had slaves, but he doesn’t ground slavery in nature. Instead, he seems to suggest that when one looks at human beings, the thing that rises to the fore is moral equality much more than moral inequality.
He says in On the Laws that human beings are far more alike to each other than they are different. This has upshots for politics in that a political community is for Cicero something that has to emerge out of consent by its members, which becomes extremely important for modern political thought.
It means that its members own it. This is one of the ways in which Cicero plays with Latin terminology. He says a res publica is a res populi, the commonwealth is a thing that belongs to the people, and that people who hold office in a political community hold it as a kind of trust from the people who own it.
Political leaders are not people who are entitled to your obedience because they’re better than you or because they’ve inherited it from their parents. The only sense in which they are entitled to obedience from their citizens is because they have been deputized by those citizens in the first place to hold those offices.
That’s a powerful vision of how politics ought to work. It doesn’t make Cicero a democrat in the modern sense. Cicero thinks that the political community is like a very valuable piece of property that is collectively owned by the citizens.
But the citizens aren’t going to be experts at running that property. I am born and raised in Boston. I have no farming experience whatsoever. If someday I were to inherit a farm, it would belong to me. I could set it on fire if I wanted to, but the prudent thing for me to do would be to find honest and competent managers for the farm.
And give them supreme executive power.
And to largely defer to their expertise. I could fire them if I wished, and if I thought they weren’t serving my interest.
You want to find a regional manager.
Precisely. Well, ideally not a Dwight Schrute. But I think in Cicero’s view, people like Mark Antony might indeed have been a Dwight Schrute elevated to power. So Cicero’s vision of politics, therefore, is one in which political leaders really are, by the structural nature of the system, public servants rather than those who dominate the public. That too has enormous subsequent political consequences.
To add a couple more premises: Cicero has almost a social contract theory about the state of nature: that originally everything was held in common, but private property was instituted to protect the weak against the strong, and that our material needs as human beings necessitates bringing us together into political communities.
While that satisfies our material needs, once we are in those communities, our moral needs with our minds—the divine element within us that’s combined with our bodily element—that requires us to seek virtue, and in this commonwealth through private education to then become the right kind of citizens needed in order to lead it. However, when we’re practicing justice, to not mess with other people, it’s actually a negative view of liberty.
Often in an undergraduate course, you might encounter a professor who claims the concept of the state of nature is a modern idea. You might credit Hobbes with inventing it. And that’s just not true. Cicero in couple of places speculates that human beings once lived in what we can only describe as the state of nature. We did not live in settled political communities; we did not have overarching political authority over them; and therefore political communities are in that sense artificial. In the same way, Cicero says there was no private property by nature. The universe doesn’t denote what belongs to us.
But Cicero says private property is extremely useful in maintaining harmony amongst human beings. He has in mind the “tragedy of the commons.” The problem that if everything is held in common, everyone’s incentive is to use up as much as possible, as quickly as possible, because it’ll be gone. Cicero in some ways likens the issue of private property to seats in a theater: whatever seat you have in the theater doesn’t exactly belong to you. But your experience of the play is going to go much better if everyone respects the fact that they only have the seat that they’re sitting in.
Now, with this ambivalent, but ultimately supportive attitude towards private property, Cicero’s political thought spawns a tradition of thinking about private property that ultimately finds its perhaps best expositor in John Locke, who I think solved some problems that Cicero could not solve in the question of private property. The upshot for Cicero’s political system is that Cicero does not object to inequalities of property in a political community. His view of human moral equality does not entail material equality. He’s quite all right with material inequality.
Now, to link that to the question of universal justice, Cicero nevertheless also believes, though, that your obligation to respect the property of others is trans-political. You have an obligation to respect the property of people who don’t live in your political community. In fact, you have a whole host of other obligations with respect to them as well.
Cicero is one of the earliest people to try to elaborate a theory of just war. Cicero’s view, that we are all co-citizens of this great universal political community, does not lead him to be a pacifist, but it does lead him to say that even while you’re at war, even while you’re trying to kill people, you still have moral obligations towards them. They’re attenuated and limited, most of them boil down to you need to leave the door open to a possible trusting peace afterwards. But this germ of an idea in Cicero also blossoms to what becomes a very voluminous whole field of thinking, which is just war theory.
Reece Edmonds made the point that for Romans on a day-to-day basis, liberty or libertas, was not very much theorized at all. It was mainly a daily material reality of not being a slave. Now, Cicero is one of the first to come up with a theoretical conception of Roman politics, and instead it’s this cosmic universal vision as instantiated in the Roman Republic.
But I remember this line from Rousseau: “the Romans began to teach political virtue only when they no longer were practicing it.” I’m curious, does someone like Cicero and his ideas only arise as the institutions are starting to fall apart, that we have to start creating a theoretical basis justify their continuation now that they’re no longer in top form?
The philosopher Hegel has this famous saying, “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk,” which I think expresses the same general idea: that it’s only when things start falling apart that someone starts articulating either how they’re supposed to work or what’s good about them,
Like Ecclesiastes: you only receive wisdom once it’s too late to be able to wield it.
Or as I think many a pop song says, you only appreciate what you had when it’s gone. Cicero is a useful example of that idea.
It may be worth digging into his notion of liberty because, yes, Cicero’s articulating perhaps for the first time a philosophic understanding of Roman libertas just as a substantial portion of it is about to go away. It is the case that perhaps the fundamental distinction for Romans is the distinction between a free person and a slave, though it is noteworthy that Cicero doesn’t think that’s a natural distinction.
He doesn’t think that there are certain people who are supposed to be free and other people who are supposed to be slaves. Cicero, though, has a very expansive notion of what it is to not be enslaved.
For Cicero, to have libertas, is on the one hand to not be enslaved, but at least for him as a Roman, it also meant being able to participate in politics. If it is the case that a just political society is one in which the citizens own their political society, libertas is in some ways reflective of your status as a co-owner of the political society, and that means some element of political participation.
It doesn’t have to be completely equal. You don’t have to totally control politics as a member of a particular class, but you should be able to participate in some way. That usually means by voting. But you should also have certain protections from the force of the political community being brought to bear on you, irregularly or arbitrarily.
And so the Romans had notions of rights.
Ius.
Ius, yes. I-U-S. Ius, iuris for those of you who are trying to decline it. And these rights were like a patchwork of both privileges and protections for citizens.
So one such right was suffragio, suffrage, that citizens had a right to cast a ballot. Another one that’s, I think, especially important is something called provocatio, and this is the right to appeal to the people any capital conviction that a Roman citizen had undergone. Roman citizens had what we might call a right to due process, that as a Roman citizen, your stuff couldn’t be taken, and your life couldn’t be taken without due process of law.
Cicero gives a speech at one point prosecuting a Roman governor of a province precisely for violating this right among citizens. The orations are called In Verrem. The prosecutions are the speeches against Verres. And in these speeches, Cicero depicts the suffering of a Roman citizen who is being publicly humiliated and tortured without his right to appeal to the people being recognized. Cicero with great pathos calls out to his audience, the jurors, and says, “Do the rights of a Roman citizen mean nothing now?”
As he elaborates upon it, he both tries to bring it home to the jurors that as an individual, you might someday want this right. This is why it’s important that we protect this, so that you as an individual not find yourself subject to this kind of abuse arbitrarily at the will of one individual. But also, Cicero says, it’s actually an affront to you collectively as the co-owners of this political community, that this one guy whom we deputed to rule over Sicily, one of our provinces, did not respect your ownership rights to have the final say in this question.
I think that dynamic well illustrates the way in which libertas is both this individual thing for the Romans. It’s a set of protections for you as an individual, and also reflects the collective governance of the political community.
It is the case that Cicero is almost desperately trying to both give a theoretical account of and justification for Rome’s delicate and very complicated constitutional balancing of the interests of the common people with the expected hereditary privileges of its elites, with its need for effective executive action, especially as its political reach expands. So it may be the case that he articulates these precisely as they’re coming apart.
There’s actually a very good book called Crisis and Constitutionalism by Benjamin Straumann that digs into this, which I highly recommend. And I think there is quite a bit of truth to that suggestion.
In Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul makes a statement when a mob is forming. He appeals to the local Roman official, saying, “ I am a Roman citizen. This cannot be done to me.” And he’s basically saying, “I am appealing to the emperor, because there are certain rights and protections I have as a Roman citizen.” Something he hides, and then he flips out his ID: “Roman Citizen ID.” Roman immunity...
It’s a powerful kind of trump card, and especially so in the early days of the empire. When the Caesars are still attempting to suggest to everyone that it really is still a republic that we’re living under—which is when Paul lives—the possession of Roman citizenship is an extremely powerful social force field. You can’t screw with this person with impunity because the most powerful military in the known world will come knock on your door and burn down your house if you hurt one of our citizens. It becomes a very powerful vision of what good politics could do for people, is to give them this kind of sense of personal bodily security.
To go back to The Dream of Scipio. In his perspective of the whole cosmos, it’s the sense that you, a Roman, are somehow connected to this larger cosmology, in which your imperial civilizing mission is fulfilling this larger providential role for the world. Something that other later writers like Augustine and Dante would grab onto in different ways.
An interesting tension resonates throughout Cicero’s political thought, which is if early Rome instantiates the best of the mixed regime, and it is going out and conquering the world and bringing people into it, then does that mean that the wars of Rome, when they’re no longer in their early self-defense stage, but are wars of expansion, justified by a civilizing mission?
Cicero is the first one to give a political theory framework for the Roman Empire at this point. And it’s become the self-conception after he dies and one of the parts of his legacy.
So Cicero has a tension in his thought that I think you’ve just brought out pretty well, that on the one hand, he argues that the Roman state—at least of the relatively recent past and not as things are falling apart right then—is the best instantiation of the principles of natural law ever seen.
If that is the case, and it is the case that the principles of natural law apply everywhere, it’s not an enormous intellectual leap to say then the march of Rome is the march of civilization, that the further Rome goes, the more people have been brought into the light of natural law and of true justice.
Now, Cicero never quite endorses that vision. He doesn’t say it would be great if we conquered the world. However, he does, in his just war theory, distinguish between different sorts of justified wars, and one kind of war that later just war theorists would have serious issues with that he justifies are wars for imperium, as he calls it, for the sake of imperial rule.
He insists that such wars have to be waged with much less viciousness. They can’t be genocidal, for instance, which was more common in the ancient world than we like to think about. He does say they can be acceptable, and it seems like the only reason they could be acceptable is because they bring the goods of just society to others.
While that does seem ludicrously hypocritical and philosophically indefensible to us today, it is worth noting that some of Rome’s wars just prior to Cicero’s time were wars waged by its allies. The Social Wars were waged by allies who were demanding further integration into the Roman system.
Essentially, the Romans were fought by people who were demanding to be allowed to be Romans. And Paul is not an Italian, is not a Roman, Paul’s declaration of his Roman citizenship is illustrative of the fact which again, Cicero is submerged and inchoate in Cicero’s thought, but that idea which gets picked up by later Romans isn’t entirely ludicrous.
And in fact, the history of the Roman Empire is the history of progressive expansion of Roman citizenship, largely at the demand of these people who, it’s true, had as their alternative to be a subject people of Rome. But the desirability of the set of rights that come along with being a Roman citizen are not trivial and are therefore, I think, not a ludicrous thing for Cicero to think it might be good for these goods to be brought to others, though probably not at the point of a sword.
After the fall of Western Rome. Romaness is more of an ethos, and people continually look to Cicero. I believe St. Jerome has a fever vision, in which God asks him, “What are you?” And St. Jerome replies, “ I’m a Christian.” He goes, “No, you’re a Ciceronian.” His influence among later Roman and then especially early Christian thinkers was very pronounced, which is why there was so much attention given to the continuation and the transcribing of his works.
St. Augustine was converted from his Manicheanism by reading Cicero’s lost dialogue, “On Natural Law.” And a lot of Cicero’s ideas helped prepare the way in his mind philosophically for the reception of Christianity later on, as he recounts in The Confessions. Lactantius, who is a famous Christian apologist and was a tutor to one of Constantine’s sons, is a major Ciceronian. Thomas Aquinas cites him often. Dante puts Cicero in Limbo as one of the righteous pagans. Can you tell me a bit about Cicero’s reception in the later medieval period?
To maybe start towards the end of the Roman period with people, yes, like Lactantius or Augustine, Cicero’s ideas about justice, about universality, about natural law, and about the absence of natural slavery are taken to be in many ways perfectly compatible with Christian principles.
He misses the crucial thing, which is the Incarnation and the Resurrection as divinely revealed truths. But Augustine makes an explicit case that Christians should feel no compunction about taking what is good from the pagan thinkers, and Cicero is among the top echelon. Probably he and Plato constitute, at least from Augustine’s point of view, the best of the pagans.
He uses the metaphor of the Israelites taking the gold of the Egyptians, but using it for their own purposes.
Precisely. And in one area that remains undisputed up through the Renaissance at least is Cicero again as the model of Latin eloquence for anyone wishing to teach people rhetoric. That undergoes a kind of revival with the rise of Christianity, because a new forum for rhetoric emerges, which is the pulpit in church. You’re going to need these guys to know how to address their congregations, so Cicero becomes essential for that. But his moral political ideas also become quite central.
On Duties is an essential text for over a thousand years.
It’s quite possibly at least the most widely copied, and therefore one presumes the most widely read, work of pagan antiquity up until maybe as late as the nineteenth century. It’s taken up by Augustine, Lactantius, Jerome, Ambrose. So many of the Western church fathers adopt it. It becomes precisely because it is blessed by the church fathers. He’s one of the writers who is most frequently preserved and engaged in the medieval period.
So Thomas Aquinas makes use of him, so does Marsilius of Padua. And then he becomes hugely influential in the Renaissance. Petrarch is an enormous, voracious consumer, and in fact a rediscoverer of Cicero’s texts. But he also goes on to become important. Martin Luther says Cicero’s prospects on Judgment Day are better than those of the pope, which maybe is setting the bar a little low given Luther’s position on the papacy.
Counter-reformers also, or figures like Erasmus and Thomas More, are deeply influenced by him, his moral thinking especially. So even as Cicero is articulating, as you put it, a negative vision of justice, and has a state the function of which is not simply to make its citizens virtuous—in the way that, say, a Platonic or Aristotelian vision of politics might have it—nevertheless, it is extremely interested in the development of human virtue.
The work on duties is primarily focused to how we ought to cultivate moral virtue in ourselves and in our children. Christians found this to be largely true that Cicero’s views of the nature of justice, the nature of liberality, the nature of moderation, and the nature of greatness of soul, all of these were able to be adopted largely without transformation by Christian thinkers.
The big break, however, comes with Niccolò Machiavelli.
Yes, so Machiavelli is famous for making big breaks. One of his chief targets appears to be Cicero. So Machiavelli is this famous Florentine thinker, writer, and political actor in his own right, whose name has become a synonym with a certain kind of cunning and craftiness. Machiavelli comes of age in a time and in a place that is suffused with Ciceronian ideas in what we now describe by shorthand as Renaissance humanism: a flourishing of moral and aesthetic and political ideas that are deeply indebted to Cicero, though not only to Cicero. And Machiavelli reacts against this.
I think one of the most fundamental and maybe easiest ways to grasp his disagreement with Cicero is to go back to the Dream of Scipio that we were discussing. Machiavelli looks at the world and sees none of the harmony, none of the divinely orderedness that Cicero sees in the world. That fundamental disagreement with Cicero—that there is no underlying divine order and therefore no underlying divine sanction for the principles of justice—has enormous consequences then for how one thinks about politics.
And yet Machiavelli, like Cicero, is (at least in my view) a republican. He thinks that republican political systems are superior to their alternatives, and yet Machiavelli offers a very different notion of what makes for a good republic also inspired by Rome, but he picks up very different ideas about what Rome was about than what Cicero at least wanted Rome to be about.
So Machiavelli looks at Rome and sees its wars of expansion and its conflicts not as these problems, not as things to be solved, and not as things to be overcome by harmony, but as essential to its greatness. Machiavelli makes an argument that conflict is good, essentially, and that internal tumults, the constant fighting between Rome’s elites and its common people, are good.
Those Cicero was seeking to ameliorate with a vision of harmony, Machiavelli says: “No, that’s a feature, not a bug of the Roman system.” It was precisely the vigor that kind of conflict engendered that enabled Rome to conquer. For Machiavelli, such conquest is one of the central major pluses of a political community. Your effectiveness is at least partially evaluated by how well you take on your neighbors. Machiavelli has a vision of politics in which he frequently and explicitly inverts the Ciceronian vision.
For instance, Cicero says there are two ways for us to conflict with each other. We can fight with words, or we can fight with swords. The first is characteristic of human beings, and we should do our best to channel conflict into verbal conflict. Machiavelli takes up the same metaphor and says, “Yeah, but we really need the beast, not just the human side of ourselves,” and in fact reduces conflict with words to conflict through the law.
For Machiavelli, laws simply are rules that are backed up by force. In fact, as you dig deep into Machiavelli, for Machiavelli there is no conception that you find in Cicero that right might ultimately make for might. Machiavelli seems to say that might, in fact, is what makes right.
He thinks that republics are mightier than many other alternative forms of organizing ourselves. But he gives to the history of political thought a radically different vision of what the lessons are to be learned from the Roman story and from the Roman experience that is fairly explicitly aimed as a rival at the Ciceronian.
He reduces political philosophy to its most basic elements: the few want to rule the many, and the many don’t want to be ruled by the few. And you’re not going to concern yourself with “imaginary principates or republics” which goes against both Plato and Cicero and St. Augustine all in one sentence. With the “new modes and orders,” he is trying to introduce will create the modern nation-state or what becomes the modern world.
Now, in your account, Cicero and Machiavelli are two poles that create ways to think about republican self-government. Machiavelli has his followers in Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, while Cicero has his followers in the early modern period among Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf—who use natural law as a basis for what would become international law—as well as among the English Republicans like John Milton.
And then the question is, who was John Locke following? Because the major contention of your book is that John Locke, unlike as scholars who descend from the school of Leo Strauss might contend, was not himself a strict Hobbesian and secretly a Machiavellian, but was actually much more dearly a follower of Cicero.
There’s a lot of complicated intellectual conflict that goes on in the early modern period. But yes, it is the case that Machiavelli is a real shock to the system. If anyone reads Machiavelli’s Prince, it’s extremely short. It’s extremely arresting. It’s quite bracing in its apparent straightforwardness.
Machiavelli does inaugurate a new way of looking at politics that you might call realpolitik, a power-oriented politics. That does get taken up by certain thinkers like Thomas Hobbes. It’s not at all clear that Hobbes read Machiavelli, but he certainly shared with him an orientation towards politics that’s focused on power and conflict and violence. Of course, Hobbes wanted to eliminate those things, so in that way, he is in fact a bit closer to Cicero in his preference for harmony and order over conflict.
In Leo Strauss’s account, the idea is that Machiavelli creates in the first wave of modernity something that’s very radical and needs to be moderated, and the people who slowly moderate it would be first Hobbes, Sir Francis Bacon, then Locke, and then Montesquieu, and it’s made into something much more palatable for human beings.
It seems at least to me when I look at this history, that as Machiavelli is trying to untether politics from moral limits and moral constraints, a group of thinkers emerges who tries to reintroduce those constraints. And those are people like Samuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius, who are not household names anymore, but who were enormously influential in the early modern period.
One of the things they find particularly useful in Cicero is this notion of natural law, which is totally discarded by Machiavelli. You will not find the words natural law or anything that corresponds to the idea of universal moral right in Machiavelli. But Grotius and Pufendorf confront a world that is new in a certain way, especially in light of the ongoing wars of religion.
So you have the breakdown of Christendom. You have the emergence of a Catholic world and a Protestant world, and in fact, internal conflicts within both of those worlds. The idea that you could have a purely theologically informed universal moral system is breaking down because those theological disagreements are becoming unbridgeable.
Natural law seems to hold out the possibility that one could do this, because the idea of natural law is that you can figure out what is right and wrong on the basis of human reason without appeal to revelation and without appeal to special knowledge. This is the idea of natural law that goes back to the classical world, and one version of it is exposited by Cicero.
It’s this version of natural law as a set of rules that we can discern through reason by looking at the ordered nature of the world that Grotius and Pufendorf pick up, that they suggest can bind us all, whether we’re Catholic or Protestant or neither of those things, and that they can ground international law, which would have to be able be recognized by people with different theological premises.
John Locke admits pretty straightforwardly his debts to those thinkers and to Cicero. So as with Thomas Hobbes, it’s pretty unclear—and I think somewhat doubtful—that Locke ever read Machiavelli, but he would certainly have been familiar with people who had been influenced by Machiavelli.
These English Republicans, who had been on the parliamentary side of the English Civil War, were people in whose circles Locke moved. But Locke’s thought is grounded in a notion of natural law that he admits in his work On Education are derived first from Grotius and Pufendorf, but then their origin he more or less asserts can be found in Cicero.
So at one point, Cicero says when you’re educating a young man, two books he needs to read are: the Bible, which is a safe call in Locke’s day and age, and Cicero’s On Duties. And then he says if you want the more advanced education for him, he can then progress from Cicero’s On Duties to Grotius and Pufendorf, who, as I say, themselves admit that their natural law is drawn from Cicero’s.
Locke’s understanding of natural law as he lays it out in the Two Treatises—which is this work that is hugely influential in the American founding—looks a lot like Cicero’s notion of justice. So Locke says, first, “You own yourself, you have a right to your life, and you have an obligation not to harm other people’s lives or their property,” which sounds an awful lot like Cicero’s definition of justice, which is don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff.
Then Locke says, “You also have a right, and perhaps a moral obligation, to step in when you see these principles of justice being violated by others,” which sounds an awful lot like the second component of Cicero’s notion of justice. Then he outlines a vision of human freedom that is largely involved in doing what you wish, which is a definition one can encounter in Cicero. He has a vision of human society grounded in a social contract, which is a Ciceronian notion.
There are a whole host of other ways in which one sees Ciceronian ideas in Locke, especially in his ideas about property, but the most straightforward way one can find Cicero’s influence on Locke is to look at his library. After the Bible, the work that has the most copies in Locke’s library was Cicero’s On Duties. Cicero is the most represented author in Locke’s library, aside from Locke himself. Locke makes the epigraphs to a number of his works, including the Second Treatise, from Cicero’s works.
When one of Locke’s friends wants to praise him, he says, “Locke might be the best philosopher who ever lived except maybe Tully.” And Tully is the English nickname for Marcus Tullius Cicero. So for me the line between Cicero and Locke is both very clear and very important for us, given how influential Locke is to the modern world, to America in particular. To see that many of Locke’s ideas have their basis in Cicero’s political thought is, for me, one of the important takeaways of the book.
With Locke, it was recently documented that a friend had recounted when they were college students that Locke was secretly reading Hobbes, but wasn’t telling anyone about it.
I am completely persuaded that Locke read Hobbes.
One of the more amusing little tidbits one can get from reading Locke is that Locke at one point, in response to being accused of being a Hobbesian, says, “I have never read the justly decried Hobbes.” And if one were a prosecutor of Locke at that point, one would go, “Gee, John, how would you know that Hobbes should be decried if you hadn’t read him?” So I think Locke is a reader of Hobbes, and I have very little doubt that Locke was a reader of Hobbes.
To turn to the Straussian account, I think it would be fair to say that one of the things Locke is trying to do is to build greater moral restraint into a social contract system of the sort that Hobbes had built. So Hobbes has a vision of a social contract that does require us all to consent to the political authority that’s over us, and then once we’ve signed on, that political authority can do pretty much whatever it wants to us.
And unless it’s trying to kill us, we don’t have a right to resist. Locke wants to build in quite a bit more protections for individuals and for the political community as a whole than I think Hobbes does. Though, the way he builds those protections in are Ciceronian. There is, a profound family resemblance between the vision of politics that Locke endorses and the one that Cicero endorses. They’re not identical, there’s an intellectual debt that Locke more or less acknowledges.
Locke took a lot from Cicero’s ideas. I’m wondering, however, how much got translated over and how much got altered.
Cicero, like Locke, would have a providential view. He sees the Roman regime having been built over time, but no one single individual having fully designed it, which shows the work of providence. He believes in a general human equality, very atypical among classical thinkers. And he believes in the commonwealth as the property of all these relatively equal people. According to Locke, we are the property of God, and the political society that we enter into is our common property.
But Cicero is an academic skeptic. And while he has a teleological view that nature has these purpose-driven processes unfolding within them towards certain innate goals, the way that conception of natural law is implemented in political society is, however, non-teleological.
We’re not trying to “make men moral” through public education. This is a private domestic affair. Instead, justice is mainly about keeping people to stop messing with each other’s lives. So it’s not an innate goal of the state to achieve human flourishing. That easily fits in with Locke, but does the teleological conception of nature also go?
Locke, along with other early modern philosophers after Descartes, dispenses with formal and final causation. He’s a representationalist in epistemology. And so we cannot actually know if such things exist in nature. When we’re talking about natural law, is it just that Cicero was actually much more Lockean, or is that a lot of the implications of these ancient ideas were taken, but this core central substantial theory about teleological nature was left behind?
This is a very good question. It requires us to get a little bit into the real nitty-gritty. One way to think about this is it’s true that Cicero does posit natural ends to things. The best representation of the teleology of natural ends, I have always thought, is the classic example of the acorn and the oak tree. The teleological nature of the acorn is to bloom and to grow and flourish and turn into an oak tree. That’s what natural ends are.
The vision you get in the Dream of Scipio of how the universe works is it doesn’t look like that. It looks like the permanent orbiting of the spheres. It’s not motion that has an endpoint. It’s motion that has a harmonious interaction with the motion of the other beings. And whether Cicero still endorses the acorn and oak tree vision of natural law, certainly for him, most of the relevant moral and political upshots of natural law look a lot more like the ordered motion vision.
One of the reasons I think the natural law of the early moderns is more Ciceronian than that alternative, which is sometimes attributed to Aristotle and also Thomas Aquinas, is that modern science dealt a very serious wound to the natural teleology acorn to oak tree vision of things. The vision of the universe as matter in motion without intrinsic purposes was enormously impactful on someone like Hobbes, for instance. That vision is very hard to reconcile with the acorn and the oak tree model of teleology. it’s much closer to the harmonious movement of the spheres vision of Scipio.
In fact, if you look at the solar system as people were starting to do with the development of telescopes, the new heliocentric model of the solar system, it’s not purposeful motion. All the spheres aren’t coming to rest somewhere, but they’re moving—till we started to be able to spot asteroids colliding with each other, mostly in harmonious order. It seems to me that vision of natural law, which is at least the emphasis of Cicero’s natural law vision, is the natural law that starts to be picked up by people like Locke and Grotius. That what it points towards is to enable us to move around each other, for instance, without bumping into each other.
It’s somewhat deistic.
One of the other ways in which Cicero is being rediscovered enthusiastically in the early modern period is for his academic skepticism, and for this modest attitude towards the capacity of human beings to know things for certain, which is a doubtful attitude towards the reports of our senses without allowing that doubt to transform into complete despair at using our minds to navigate the world at all.
He’s friendly with the Stoics and Epicureans, and the Platonists and the Peripatetics, but he’s neither one.
But he’s none of those because his view is that as a skeptic, he’s allowed to take what seems most probable to him.
Didn’t he believe in final ends?
So he does. He believes in them, or at least he says he believes in them, but he also says his fundamental philosophic commitment is to this skepticism. And so he believes in it, he says, because it seems most probable to him.
This isn’t Pyrrho the skeptic. How would you define skepticism as?
Cicero says, “We probably don’t have knowledge of anything.” But if you just stop there, you get to what’s often described as Pyrrhonian skepticism is this idea that we just can’t know anything, so you may as well give up trying to essentially use your mind to come to some solid ground.
In the Lives of the Philosophers, Pyrrho the skeptic would ignore the physical world around him, and his followers would make sure when he was walking the marketplace that there were no sharp things were about to hit him. However, one time the cook, when he had his friends over, burned the food, and he chased out the cook with a frying pan.
I think that illustrates that no one can really be a consistent Pyrrhonian skeptic. And Cicero has no aspiration to be. He’s actually quite insistent that he’s very different from that. Cicero says you should have a kind of humility in the confidence you have in the various beliefs you come to hold, such that you don’t insist dogmatically that you know it.
That said, some things are much more likely to be true than others, and you can speak in terms of more or less probably true, and you can even arrive at something that you think is so probably true that it’s worth acting on and perhaps even worth dying for. And so Cicero adopts what I think may actually be quite a useful attitude for us to adopt today, especially as we enter into this new AI-informed digital age where it will soon become, if it isn’t already, impossible to trust, say, photographic evidence of something as reason to believe it’s true.
Cicero thinks what one ought to do is have a chastened modesty about what you know, while nevertheless acting on what you believe to be most probable. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding also adopts as its epigraph a quote from Cicero that I think illustrates how indebted the early modern skeptic’s attitude is to Cicero.
So Cicero is highly valued by John Locke, and according to the most cited authors of the American Founding from Donald Lutz, John Locke would be number 4 on the list. St. Paul is number 1, Montesquieu’s number 2, William Blackstone’s number 3, then there’s a few moderns and ancients, Hume and Plutarch, and you go all the way down where number 12 is Cicero. And I believe just under him at 13 is Thomas Hobbes. (Take that, Hobbesians.)
A couple of historians have done really excellent work trying to tease out the ideological origins and the philosophic groundings of the American Revolution. So there are people like Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, whom I highly encourage people to read.
Americans were very eclectic readers, and so it is quite difficult to tease out any particular universally agreed upon authority amongst the American founders. Also, who counts as an American founder is frequently debated and disputed as well. It is the case that the American founders’ education would have had a heavy dose of the Bible in their education, so it’s unsurprising that St. Paul would be among the first that they would refer to.
Often if you’re doing a history of Western philosophy, you might skip straight from the Greeks to the Medieval period or even the Renaissance, all the while skipping the Romans entirely, and that would not have been reflected in the American founders’ education.
For the American founders, the Romans were often quite central, as were the texts that are associated with especially the parliamentary side of the English Civil War, which would include a number of English Republicans, as well as Whigs like John Locke who are the intellectual inheritors of that tradition.
The people who were quoting during the Revolution John Locke the most were actually ministers. And so a lot of his more radical premises and more individualistic notions were filtered and adapted through a more reformed theological framework to be made palatable, and the meaning of a lot of his phrases and words were changed as they were ingratiated into American rhetoric.
Yes. In fact, this was for a while a great mystery amongst historians of the American Revolution, which was so obviously influenced by Locke’s ideas, and people couldn’t find enough citations of Locke to explain how Lockean things were until people started checking out the sermons delivered from the pulpit. And they’re like, “Oh, here it is. Locke is everywhere in church.” So much so that probably for many Americans’ minds, the distinction between Locke and scripture was probably starting to get blurred.
To cut to the nub of it, Cicero appears to the Americans in a couple of different guises. So one is in the group of other authors from the Roman period. So Livy and Tacitus are examples of this, who are Romans who are fixated on how the republic fell and the decline of not only political freedom, but moral virtue that they associate with the collapse of the republic and the rise of the principate.
Plutarch also.
Oh, absolutely. Technically, Plutarch is a Greek, but we can count him as a Roman because he keeps writing about the lives of the Romans under the Roman Empire.
So this depiction seems to have occupied Americans’ minds because there started to be an attitude towards Great Britain, that Great Britain is the source of the same kind of corruption that brought down Rome, that the wealth of Great Britain—the frankly high church Protestantism of the British court and crown that too closely resembled Catholicism to many of the very Protestant wing of the American colonists—started to frighten the American colonists.
And so the story of how Rome transformed from a republic into the principate and the moral decay that both caused and then ensued from that transition frightened the American founders on the one hand. On the other hand, Cicero stands apart from them in a category that also holds people like John Locke and Montesquieu as being someone who also offers a vision of healthy republican politics to which one could aspire.
It’s in that light that people like John Adams and James Wilson especially see Cicero as essential for understanding the American Revolution, so much so that at one point, Adams essentially writes, “If Cicero could see what we did in founding the United States, it would seem like the thing he only speculated could be actually came into reality.” They take their notion of what a republic is from Cicero. I think through Locke you get a vision of individual liberty. Montesquieu also admits an enormous debt to Cicero, so much so that he says, “Of all the ancients, I wish I could resemble Cicero the most.”
I don’t want to be claiming America simply is the Ciceronian republic, though I get closer to that than pretty much anyone else does. I do think, though, that to understand the American founding properly, both in itself and in its relationship to what comes before, it is essential to see that many of the lessons of ancient Rome as compiled and constructed by Cicero are deeply influential in it.
To see the mere aesthetic way in which this is true, one needs only to go to Washington, D.C., and see virtually all of the public buildings are one way or another a kind of homage to Roman architectural styles and, in fact, the attitude of Roman sculpture. The American founding is suffused with Romanness.
I’ll just add also in the ways that the American founders wrote. If you read The Federalist Papers, you’ll see they’re written under the name Publius. Many of the other pen names and pseudonyms adopted by the American founders as they wrote were Roman on both sides, including from time-to-time people adopting the penname Cicero. The Ciceronian valences are quite deep in the American founding.
There is a profound amount of work that goes into studying the political thought of the American Revolution. But I wanted to read a quote from Captain Levi Preston, an American Revolutionary War veteran who was being interviewed sometime in 1843. He’s asked why he went to Concord, and he has these terse Spartan-like answers:
What did I go for?
Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?
I never saw any stamps, and I always stood none were sold.
What about the tea tax?
Tea tax, I never drank a drop of the stuff. The boys threw it all overboard.
I suppose you have been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty.
I never heard of those men. The only books that we had were the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanacs.
Then, what was the matter?
Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: We always had always governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.
That’s why Captain Levi Preston fought. Anyway, it seemed like the looking to Rome was an elite phenomenon among the drivers of the Revolution, but the people who were charging for it were like, “We just wanted to preserve our way of life.”
There’s quite a lot of truth to that. For the American colonies, especially the New England colonies, there’s a decent case to be made that those were the most literate societies on the earth at the time. And so you were more likely to find ordinary people who could read, including maybe read Latin, there more than anywhere.
But it is the case that the vast majority of ordinary people don’t go to war over abstractions or ideas that they read in long ago books. But it is the case that the Revolution is shaped very powerfully by the elites who, were in charge both on the local level, but also on the national level.
In some ways it seems even more important to note that once the Revolutionary War is won, then the country does become a little bit like the dog who caught the car. That is to say, they got what they wanted, and now they have to figure out what to do with it. Here I think perhaps more than at any other point during the revolution, elite influence is most significant, because constitutional construction, when it’s done all at once, at least when it’s done at a particular moment in time…
Some guy’s hidden away in some building. The doors are closed, no press, and then “Hey guys, we got something for you. It’s called a constitution.”
It comes out and then it’s offered for public acceptance or rejection, but that’s all it’s offered for. There you see, I think, the profound influence of where the rubber meets the road of political philosophy. The political actors of the time were, of course, also responding to immediate political concerns. They had their own political agendas. The Constitution is a work of compromise. But it also reflects political philosophy and what the founders took to be the lessons from previous political projects.
And I think it would be hard to read, say, The Federalist Papers without thinking that the example of Rome was, if not the central, one of the top three intellectual images they had in their head, both about what to aim for, but also about what to avoid. The Roman Republic falls. Cicero’s death is tied up in that. And the American founders want a republic that won’t. And so one of the things they have an eye to is what went wrong in the Roman case. And Cicero has, as we’ve been discussing, some plausible answers about that.
If you could ask Cicero one question and you were interviewing him, what would it be?
Oh, that is a tough one. I think it would be an unfair thing to say, “Could you recite from memory all of the works of yours that we have lost so we could have those?” But if he had that kind of encyclopedic memory, I would ask that and then get my pen out.
Truthfully, I would ask him how important his vision of the divine is to his natural law, because Cicero’s writing On the Nature of the Gods and some of his other writings suggest an actual genuine skepticism at times about the nature of the divine, and yet it seems as though his natural law doesn’t hold together without that Supreme Being providing the order to things. I would really love to know where he actually stood on that question, because downstream of that are pretty much all of the others.
If you could only get back one lost Cicero text, what would it be?
I have to go with the entirety of De Republica, because it is the case that we have others that we’re missing much more or indeed all of them, and I could be damned by classicists for not asking for one of those. But with De Republica, the things we have are so intriguing and moving and interesting that basically that’s what I would ask for.
Last question: for your students reading Cicero, what is the big takeaway that they should have from him? Why should we read Cicero? Why should we study him? How does he help us?
Okay, so here I’m going to have a narrowly tailored yes to college students, but I will say specifically they should read On Duties, because there are very few great works of political and moral philosophy that are explicitly aimed at people who are about 20 years old and who are trying to decide what to do with their lives and what people they want to be.
On Duties is that. It’s written to his son, who is essentially off at college, and it’s a book about what person you want to be and how you should make up your mind. One of the interesting things about it is that it’s not entirely prescriptive, that Cicero talks at great length about human individuality and difference and the importance of each individual figuring out what their unique nature is. I think students especially have a lot to get out of On Duties, and I highly recommend it to them.
Professor Hawley, this has been a fascinating and terrific conversation.
Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.
