that the wise person alone is rich.
These were not paradoxes in the logical sense, only in that they flew in the face of common sense. It was actually the counterintuitiveness of these ideas that the Stoics leaned on to catch people’s attention: How can virtue be the only good if we need health and money to live? Is a lie really as bad as killing someone? Plenty of philosophers were visibly poor; how are they rich? The possibilities for discussion, for counterexamples, for gotcha moments, were endless—and Cicero loved noodling with the prompts laid down by Zeno and Cleanthes and Aristo and everyone else.
Ironically, what hurt Cicero in politics—the size of his ambition, his vacillation, his desire to please—suited him supremely well in the self-appointed task of being the first to give an eloquent and detailed account of Greek philosophy in the Latin language. While drawn to the rigor and precision of the Stoics, and to their well-developed ethical thinking, he danced with the Academic/Platonist school most regularly, with its skeptical method and insistence on arguing every side of any issue.
As an Academic, his opportunism made for great writing. So too his ability to talk and entertain ideas he didn’t actually believe. He was a little like Carneades, arguing all sides of the discussion. This habit, infuriating to those around him, undoubtedly preserved all sorts of disparate sources for us that we can continue to enjoy today. It was beautiful writing, with ideas that would shape the world. Saint Jerome would later worry that he loved Cicero’s works more than the Bible. Saint Augustine was converted to philosophy by reading Cicero’s now lost work, the philosophical dialogue Hortensius. Seneca and other Stoics would read his works with great interest. But as a person, as a leader, his foot-in-both-camps mentality was a shameful vice.
Eventually the bill from the latter came due. The last years of Cicero’s life were a mad dash to write and to escape the blows of fate. Indeed, with the exception of a book on rhetoric, De Inventione, composed at the early age of around twenty, his major books were all written in a twelve-year span between 56 BC and 44 BC, and in fact the bulk of them between 46 and 44 BC.
If Cicero had completely retreated into his books, we might admire him. Plutarch tells us that he made it a point to visit Rome and pay his respects to Caesar, and even awarded him honors. When Caesar rebuilt a torn-down statue of his own rival, Pompey, Cicero was there to flatter him, perhaps in the way that he himself had always wished to be flattered. In setting up these statues of Pompey, Cicero slobbered, you have firmly established your own.
Cato, whose martyred body lay fresh in the grave—as did Pompey’s—would have been sick at the scene.
In 45 BC, Cicero’s beloved daughter Tullia died. Here, Stoicism might have served him well, as he would later advise his friend Brutus over his own tragic loss in a few years. Instead, with nothing to fall back on, nothing to reassure himself, only the ideas in his books and his faltering ambitions, he was bereft and broken. His career seemed over. His life was falling apart.
So Cicero continued to write, but not live, philosophically. He continued to write about Stoicism, but declined to take any of it to heart. In a way, this would be a major contribution of his to the philosophy. By falling short of the doctrines he passed along from Zeno, from Chrysipus, and even from Stoic peers he wrote about like Rutilius Rufus and Cato, he was proving why the ideas matter. He was like Diotimus, showing us what not to do.
Cicero would dedicate his book Tusculan Disputations to his friend Brutus, and in 45 BC, Brutus in turn would write a book inspired by Stoicism, On Virtue, which he would dedicate to Cicero.
Unlike Cicero, Brutus wasn’t just dabbling. Like Cato, like a real philosopher, he was prepared to risk everything to save the country he loved: He was going to assassinate Julius Caesar, now the dictator of the republic Cicero and Brutus had loved. When Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators hatched their plot to kill Caesar, however, they left Cicero out of the loop. They believed he was too nervous, too untrustworthy, too likely to second-guess the plot or undermine it, unintentionally or not. In short, when the moment counted, Cicero couldn’t be counted on. He wasn’t Stoic enough.
Shakespeare renders it this way:
CASSIUS
But what of Cicero? Shall we sound him?
I think he will stand very strong with us. . . .
BRUTUS
O, name him not! Let us not break with him,
For he will never follow anything
That other men begin.
They feared their friend lacked courage and that his ego would hold them back. History would bear this out. Almost immediately after Caesar’s death, Cicero began to take credit for the other men’s deed, claiming that Brutus had shouted his name as he plunged the dagger in.
As Cicero would explain in a speech, “Now why me in particular? Because I knew? Quite possibly the reason [Brutus] called my name was just this: after an achievement similar to my own he called on me rather than another to witness that he was now my rival in glory.”
What’s past is prologue, Shakespeare would say, and so it was with his own life. His need for fame, his tendency to shift with the wind, would dog him to the end. In Caesar’s wake rose young Octavian and Mark Antony. Cicero would again choose the wrong side and, conspicuously, decline to serve in the civil war he helped bring about.
Cicero’s final work, surprisingly, would be on duty. He had never been a man whose career was about duty. Fame. Honor. Proving doubters wrong. That had been his drive. But with his twenty-one-year-old son, Marcus, just completing his first year of philosophical training in Athens, perhaps Cicero wished to instill in his boy a stronger sense of moral purpose than his own ambitious father had in himself. The work premises that Marcus, like Hercules at the crossroads, is being wooed by vice and at risk of forsaking the path of virtue. In response, Cicero took up the Stoic efforts of Diogenes, Antipater, Panaetius (above all), and Posidonius to not only lay down Stoic ethical theory, but give his wayward son the practical precepts he needed to keep him off the road to ruin.
In the work’s dedication, he wrote to Marcus:
Although philosophy offers many problems, both important and useful, that have been fully and carefully discussed by philosophers, those teachings which have been handed down on the subject of moral duties seem to have the widest practical application. For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.
They are words well written, as was nearly everything Cicero produced. What was missing, it seems, is any personal absorption of them.
In the end, it would be Cicero’s love of rhetoric that would seal his personal fate. He had chided Rutilius Rufus for his brevity in the face of his accusers, saying that rhetoric might have saved him. But walking the plank in 44–43 BC, Cicero delivered fourteen orations against Mark Antony, one of the heirs to Caesar’s power.
It would be one thing if Cicero had, as Cato would have, simply condemned excess and brutality where he saw it. Instead, his Philippics, as the speeches are now known, were a political ploy to play Mark Antony off Octavian, Caesar’s nephew, both with equally authoritarian designs. Cicero was splitting the difference, not standing on principle. And considering his grandiose comparison of his own speeches to those made by Demosthenes more than two hundred years earlier, it’s clear that once again he was motivated more by the limelight than by truth.