Abstract
A few decades ago, the Romans barely rated consideration in political thought—their arguments seen as uninspired and derivative; their lasting contributions residing in the details of law and administration, which during the twentieth century became less-and-less the purview of political theory; and their oligarchic society even less admired. We knew Rome from its imperial ambitions; its aqueducts, roads, and sewers; and its descent into the decadence of the principate. It was three decades ago that I sat in a graduate seminar in which we read a short excerpt from Cicero. It was all we needed to read; we knew serious ancient political thought began and ended with the Greeks.
That has changed in recent decades with renewed interest in Cicero’s philosophic and political ideas. There were political theorists like Walter Nicgorski and Neal Wood who were tilling Ciceronian fields alone. 1 Elizabeth Rawson advanced a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of Cicero than the standard characterization inherited from Theodor Mommsen, notably in Römische Geschichte (1861). 2 But J.G.F. Powell’s edited collection, Cicero the Philosopher (1995), marked a turning point in the reception of Cicero as an original thinker. In the ensuing decades, scholars from different theoretical perspectives began to see in Cicero’s texts not only richer and original conceptualizations of the res publica, constitutionalism, and civic ethics, but also his contributions to how we can think about violence, participation, citizenship, identity, and democratic discourse. Jed Atkins’s Roman Political Thought is an introduction to Roman political ideas that also uses Roman thought to reflect on modern liberalism and republicanism. Gregory Smith, in Political Philosophy and the Republican Future, looks to Cicero to combat the modern forces of “globalization, technological intensification, and bureaucratization” (286) by seeking to “recover the insights of premodernity that modernity closed down” (4).
Methodological issues loom. How does one bridge the ancient and modern worlds that bring with them different vocabularies, contexts, and concepts without making ancient texts into mirrors of our own thoughts? Atkins is careful here. He highlights how the Romans knew nothing of “the modern ideas of capitalism, individual autonomy, the nation-state, and liberal-democratic constitutions” (9). Rather than tracing a republican tradition that leaves out the unsavory aspects of their origins in Rome, Atkins “invites readers to return to republicanism’s origins in a status-driven, hierarchical, slave-owning world with a very different set of values from those prevailing in western liberal democracies” (9). Atkins contextualizes terms throughout the book to show how these words and concepts have different resonances from their contemporary meanings, all lending nuance to the temporal constraints of comparison.
Smith, on the other hand, largely skips over the methodological issue by lifting the truths of thought from time. He sees Cicero as recovering the truths of Plato and creating a conceptual space for Christianity that then reappears in America by way of Abraham Lincoln, all read against and serving as a response to the bad boys of modernity, Hegel and Nietzsche. Smith writes, “As historical beings, to take our bearings intelligently,” we need “a fixed point” that “will present itself to thought, not to any of our senses” (43). That is, we can only read and act intelligently in history from outside history. Smith reads Cicero from outside history. That allows him to interpret Cicero without the impediments of language (Latin barely appears), the shades of meaning that inhere in historically laden concepts, or the scholarship that has contributed to our understanding of these texts. These two methodological orientations foretell how the authors will situate their work in time—how they treat the texts and how they address scholarship.
Atkins’s Roman Political Thought is a readable and surprisingly nuanced introduction, aimed at undergraduates or possibly graduate students. I say surprisingly because it is an enormously difficult task to communicate the complexities of Roman thought, which require understanding some of the history, the complicated institutions, the assumptions of political life, and the political and philosophic vocabulary that organized these ideas. Moreover, Atkins is generous in attributions of scholarship, giving the reader directions for exploring in more depth particular ideas or controversies. I think it is this feature that makes the book helpful to graduate students.
Atkins’s book is organized by themes that Romanists will find familiar, including the opening chapter on Rome’s constitutional system. So much of what the introductory reader likely knows about Roman political thought lies in the idea of a constitutional set of checks and balances, notably articulated by the Greek Polybius. But scholars divide sharply over whether talking about a constitutional system in Rome is so anachronistic that it distorts as much as it reveals about Roman politics. Atkins balances these claims, not necessarily rejecting the term but suggesting that its use in a Roman context must reflect the complicated relationship between customs, laws, and rights by which the system operated.
Chapter 2 ventures into the Roman notion of libertas. Atkins introduces this discussion by way of Benjamin Constant, Isaiah Berlin, and the neo-Republican works of Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, and Philip Pettit to show how liberty has been differently conceived. Atkins expands the neo-Republican view of Roman liberty as nondomination (as not being owned), arguing that libertas is not just juridical (though there are rights) but also cultural. Liberty includes having a particular standing before others in the pursuit of gloria, honor, and dignitas (56).
Atkins continues to offer perspective on particular concepts, beginning Chapter 3 with different conceptions of citizenship—one that emphasizes participation and “highlights” the capacity of political agents “to share in political rule, processes, decisions, and duties” (64); one premised on particular legal claims and rights; and one that provides individuals with a particular standing and identity. Tidy distinctions between ancient and modern give way to a deeper understanding of the tensions between duties, legal rights, and status that were all present in Roman conceptions of citizenship.
Civic virtues connect Chapter 3 on citizenship with Chapter 4 on corruption. The challenge of an introductory discussion of Roman virtues is to avoid the superficial characterizations of these virtues without getting lost in the sheer volume of Roman writing on the subject, the often-technical arguments underlying different claims, and the differences and disagreements among the Romans and between the contending, but often overlapping, perspectives of the Stoics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, and Academics. Atkins focuses more on a Roman ideology than philosophy here, usefully connecting the virtues to the honor code of gloria, honor, and dignitas. He also looks at the transformation of these virtues under the principate and their critique by Augustine as unstable and prone to a destructive love of glory and domination.
Chapter 5 addresses what has drawn considerable scholarly interest recently—the role of rhetoric, deliberation, and judgment. As in the previous chapters, Atkins gives some perspective on this issue, addressing briefly the suspicion of rhetoric by Plato, Hobbes, and deliberative democrats. As Atkins suggests, “Roman rhetoricians illuminate the way in which institutions shape deliberative practices, the role of non-rational resources in deliberation and persuasion, and the relationship between deliberation and political order, on the one hand, and political conflict, on the other” (113). One sees the transformation of rhetoric as the principate guts the republican institutions from their public role. Orators no longer address the controversies of the day but retreat to schools to master techniques and, when public, to flatter those in power.
Roman religion, the subject of Chapter 6, is deeply embedded in Roman politics, challenging our own sharp distinctions between these two realms. Without getting bogged down in the arcane details of Roman religion, Atkins conveys its civic dimension—the creation of sacred spaces within which political events could proceed; the diffusion of religious authority that mirrored the different sources of authority in Roman politics; the formation of civic cults to unify religious practices; and the gradual “appropriation” (144) of local cults to unify Rome’s vast territory. Atkins ends with an interesting note on the legacy of discussions of toleration by Tertullian, Lactantius, and Augustine.
The final chapter provides brief discussions of imperialism, just war theory, and cosmopolitanism, with the stated goal of showing how Roman concepts at times intersect with, and at times depart from, modern conceptions. Imperium, for example, is originally a designation of command and only later acquires the territorial notion of empire. Just wars include wars undertaken on behalf of honor and glory, which is a Ciceronian notion that is, in turn, critiqued by Augustine. Roman cosmopolitanism tends to be less premised on a notion of rights, as cosmopolitanism often is in contemporary discourse, but in the nature of the cosmos. And Roman realism, which many trace back to the Romans and Augustine, departs from contemporary versions by emphasizing the role of honor and “the need for recognition” in maintaining international order (190).
The conclusion returns, and pulls together, some of the reflections on liberalism. I will note one that I think is central to the critical distance the Romans provide: their recognition of the intangible factors that hold communities together, factors that are often less emphasized in the rights-based individualism of liberalism. As much as it was Roman constitutionalism that attracted the American founders, the Romans themselves were deeply aware of what Augustine will refer to later as the belief in the invisible—trust, recognition, gratitude, reverence, and what emerges later with Augustine, patience and humility. Perhaps it is the case that those writing as the Republic was falling apart were particularly sensitive to the bonds by which communities survive.
There are points of intersection between Atkins and Smith’s view of the Romans. In his return to Cicero’s political philosophy, Smith also focuses less on particular institutional fixes and more on the cultivation of invisible constraints. Smith provides a reading of Cicero as an “architectonic” (152, 292) philosopher who weaves together questions of religion, ethics, and politics into a philosophy of the soul (105). Smith’s reading of Cicero is aimed at claiming a role for Cicero in how, in our modern age of fragmented philosophic approaches, globalization, and self-interested commercialism, we can revitalize republican government.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the tradition of republicanism. In this narrative, which proceeds almost entirely without reference to any classical scholars, Smith traces the movement to modern republics from ancient republics, which he characterizes as “small, homogeneous, and particularistic” (which, to modify Voltaire here, Rome is neither small, homogeneous, nor particularistic) (22). The “softer” attitudes of the bourgeois gentlemen replaced the “pugnacity” of the warrior (19, 28); modern political philosophy “aimed at an eventual withering away if not elimination of religion,” which had taken over from republicanism the control of excesses (25); science and technology “aimed at the withering away of the political” and, in its place, technological mastery; and “easy going humanity and ambitious technological mastery” converged (25). Lost is a hierarchy of activities and aspirations, and in its place a celebration of hedonism that serves, among other things, commercial pursuits. Smith notes, “In the modern vision, we would become gentle, amiable, and cosmopolitan rather than committed, particularistic, pugnacious, pious, virtuous, patriotic, and so on” (27).
The only serious engagement with Roman scholarship in this chapter occurs in the final section in which Smith takes aim at the “scissors-and-paste” (30) approaches of Pocock, Skinner, and Pettit who, according to Smith, dismiss the connection of republicanism to religion and, thus, do not “in any serious sense” return “to any elements of classical republicanism” (29). I do not happen to agree with the readings of Rome by Pocock, Skinner, and Pettit, all of whom are more modern than ancient in their focus, but I can at least identify the evidence they use in making their arguments.
In Chapter 2, we learn more about Smith’s point of departure, arguing that we will never understand Cicero if we approach him from our current understanding of political theory as “groundless willing” (41). He contrasts “competing theories that rest on nothing other than the groundless, self-legislating will of its author” (40) to his own phenomenological reading of Cicero. I do not know which scholars approach Cicero this way. Smith does not identify anyone. Nor is there a discussion of the phenomenological tradition, or where Smith intersects or departs from this tradition, other than a three-page footnote on Thomas Pangle and an extended footnote on Leo Strauss. From what I can make of the argument, the long discussion of his phenomenological approach comes down to two characteristics. He develops the first characteristic by way of an analogy to a ship navigator, in which one needs a fixed point in thought in order to orient oneself. The claim is surprising since, from a phenomenological perspective, we do not orient ourselves by fixed points outside time; rather, we are oriented by relationships that are bound in time, including our own recollections of having seen something or felt something (as Cicero continually recalls throughout his works).
The other characteristic of Smith’s phenomenology is that political philosophy is always situated, which begins with the phenomenon of the cave from which we can never be completely liberated (47, 53). That claim shares as much with hermeneutics as it does with phenomenology and, I would add, is an almost axiomatic starting point of scholarship on Roman political thought, generally, and Cicero, specifically.
Smith seeks to address what he sees as the caricature of Cicero as a derivative philosopher. There is no doubt that for a variety of historical reasons, Cicero has suffered this fate. What Smith offers us, and he says his understanding of Cicero is guided by Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician and Michael Grant’s History of Rome (339, fn 10), is little that is particularly new. Surprising is that Elizabeth Rawson’s classic biography of Cicero, or for that matter the works of Thomas Mitchell and Matthias Gelzer, are not included. 3 Smith opens his new insight into Cicero with this sentence: “Cicero was an intellectually precocious youngster” (65), an observation that I assume Smith gets from Plutarch, though nothing is cited. We end up with a view of Cicero as endangered, on the run, and disguising his own views as he writes for the few in the future while surrounded by the dangerous many in the present. To understand Cicero requires that one must be an attentive reader, looking for “clues” that are hidden in his works (91).
I will give two quick examples of where this type of reading leads Smith. In one, Smith cites Cicero’s statement that he will conceal his private opinion, thus providing the opportunity for Smith to unveil the truth behind Cicero’s public disguise. But Cicero is pretty consistent about why he makes this claim; it is so that people can arrive at their own judgments about the most probable solution after hearing the different arguments. Cicero would often announce his judgment at the conclusion of the dialogue, though in a way that was always subject to future argument and consideration. In a second example, Smith writes that Cicero tried to “suppress” his Academica Priora (90), though it is not clear to what effect Smith makes this claim. Cicero’s stated unhappiness lay, as he writes in his letters, with choices of characters (Att. 13.16.1), which he had similar concerns about in the second version (Att. 13.22.1). So “suppress” (even though it is used in the Loeb introduction) might be a slightly loaded word that ultimately adds nothing to the argument and certainly cannot count as one of the clues to reading what Cicero has hidden.
Chapter 4 is focused on using the Tusculan Disputations to lay out Cicero’s approach to philosophy. The Tusculans is a powerful work, written as part of his philosophical corpus but precipitated by his own desire to cure his unrelieved grief for the loss of his daughter, who died shortly after childbirth. It is, most of all, a deeply ambivalent exercise in the practice of philosophy more than a dogmatic defense of a particular philosophic truth. Smith takes from the Tusculans that Cicero is an adherent of the Old Academy (and a Platonic epistemology) in which there are truths we can know.
The claim that Cicero embraces Plato and the Old Academy runs contrary to Cicero’s own frequent statements (and the considerable scholarship, none of it cited) that he adheres to the New Academy. The New Academy does not believe that truths can be known with certainty, but tests different versions of truth and arrives at what is most probable or persuasive (subject to change with other arguments). Smith explains Cicero’s own frequently stated identification with the New Academy by noting, “Innovators shy away from making all too clear just how significant their innovations are” (119). This “quiet and dignified” (119) Cicero, who was shy about declaring his innovations, is the same one who asked Lucceius to write a history of the period from his consulship to his return from exile so that his achievements could be enshrined. He was never hesitant about repeating the acclamation of him as a savior of the res publica. And in the Tusculans he brags that no Roman or Greek writer (except possibly Demetrius of Phalerum) mastered both a forensic and philosophic style.
Smith further clears the way for a direct line from Plato to Cicero by reading Aristotle out of Cicero. “For whatever reason, Cicero rarely addresses Aristotle directly” and rarely adopts a doctrine traceable to Aristotle; instead, he “frequently attacks Aristotle by proxy” (121). I am not sure if Smith is only referring to a specific passage or making a more general claim about Aristotle’s influence. There is scholarly debate about what books of Aristotle Cicero had accessed, though Aristotelian views had filtered down to Rome. Walter Nicgorski notes the extensive Aristotelian influences, as do Dorothea Frede and Elaine Fantham. 4
Smith is less interested in the scholarship than advancing the view that Cicero replaces an Aristotelian notion of phronesis with a self-conscious will regulated by conscience that then creates a space for Christian philosophy and later the moderns (121, 189). The word Smith references is conscientia, a term Cicero uses frequently (upwards of 70 times). There is an interesting debate about how Cicero shapes this term, and Smith could have consulted Ingo Gildenhard, who advances some of this argument. 5 But part of what makes Cicero so fascinating, and his philosophy so complicated, is that virtuous action is always embedded in the larger social fabric. He counts prudentia, Cicero’s translation of phronesis, as one of the four primary virtues. His translation of kalon as honestum (moral goodness) points to actions that merit esteem. So, too, how one appears is central to Cicero’s elevation of decorum, or appropriate action that is tied to status, as a virtue.
In Chapter 6, Smith takes up De finibus, arguing that for Cicero cosmology was not the foundation of philosophy but part of the components that are woven into the whole (128). I am not sure what Smith is referring to, but cosmology was only one part of the Hellenistic philosophical curriculum that included logic and ethics (which Cicero sets out in his description of his philosophic works in De divinatione). De finibus is an introduction to different schools of thought that, like his later philosophic writings, are developed within his own Academic skepticism in which different participants in the dialogue make the best arguments for different views so that people can make probable (but changeable) conclusions (see, for example, his explicit discussion of his philosophical practice in De officiis 2.7–8). Smith ends his discussion of De finibus by suggesting that the reader is “left to wonder why Cicero lets Piso off so easily,” whose synthetic position is the least defensible, contending that Cicero is in fact critiquing “hermeneutic eclecticism and scissors-and-paste jobs” in favor of “architectonic consistency” (152).
Smith’s conclusion requires a particular reading of the structure of De finibus (and for that matter, all his dialogues) as a guide for arriving at a definitive, unified position (whether that position is stated or, as in this case, inferred from Cicero’s silence). Smith seems to hint at this particular approach, noting the asymmetry of the chapters (133), which is an observation that has been addressed in scholarship. At the risk of getting into the weeds, I think it is important to understand the structure of the dialogue and what it means for our interpretations of Cicero. In the first two books of De finibus, Torquatus presents the Epicurean view (Book 1) and then Cicero rejects the Epicurean view from the perspective of the Stoics (Book 2). The basis of that rejection is the Epicureans’ inconsistency with our ordinary life commitments to virtue. In the second two books, Cato expands the Stoic argument (Book 3) and then Cicero critiques the Stoic position from the stance of the Academy (Book 4). The fifth book, which is the asymmetrical one because there is no sixth book, involves Cicero adopting a Stoic perspective to critique Piso (who represents Antiochus’s version of the Old Academy). In arguing against Piso, Cicero ends not with Plato but on an Academic note: The Academy, given its flexibility to take different positions, is able to both make an argument by way of Piso and critique the argument by way of Cicero (who also takes the critical position toward the Epicurean and Stoic claims in the previous books). It would have been unnecessary to create another book that critiques the Academic position since fashioning a critique against the Academics would be a demonstration of an Academic argument. Thus, the asymmetry. There is no scholar that I know of who believes, after reading this dialogue, that Cicero lets Piso’s synthetic argument off easily in order to actually show the untenability of synthesis. Nor is there any support for the view that this dialogue ends with an endorsement of Plato, the Old Academy, and the knowability of truth. The debate is what brand of skepticism Cicero endorses—a version of mitigated skepticism (one interpretation of Carneades held by Antiochus) in which one can give a qualified (but not definitive) endorsement to persuasive truths, such as particular ethical arguments, or a more radical skepticism (an alternative interpretation of Carneades made by Clitomachus) in which a persuasive claim is not an objective ground for it being more likely true.
In any case, it is impossible to read Cicero as creating architectonic consistency, or at least how I understand the word “architectonic.” Architectonics is more than a claim that there are underlying questions that connect Cicero’s concerns, or that there is some coherence in how one thinks about the gods, politics, and ethics. Architectonics suggests a grand and unified structure (an architecture) in which each piece is built on the securely laid foundation of previous pieces. I think what Smith sees as architectonic about Cicero’s philosophy is that he seeks “to get back to the unity of knowledge” that he associates with Plato (133). This unity takes a specific form, as Smith writes: “Are there future, genuinely Western, and that means Christian, options still available for that most historical of all religions, Christianity? The continuation of Western civilization depends on the answer to that question, for it is a civilization born of a unique tension between reason and revelation and unique longings for republicanism and freedom. Those are the core elements of Western civilization” (155). Augustine was architectonic. The only way in which one can read Cicero as architectonic is to assert authorial voice where none can be justified and make an epistemological claim about what one can know that runs contrary not only to Cicero’s own statements, but also to his philosophical practice. Some acquaintance with the works of Mary Beard and Malcolm Schofield on Cicero’s theological writings is sadly missing, if for no other reason than to establish some nuance to the claim. 6
The final chapters on oratory and politics operate similarly in a safe-remove from classical scholarship. I agree with Smith’s statement that Cicero argues for the “philosophic importance of shared public speech” (228). Absent in this discussion is any recognition of the recent scholarship on Cicero and oratory that addresses exactly this issue, notably the works of Joy Connolly, Bryan Garsten, Gary Remer, and Elaine Fantham. 7
Smith takes particular issue with Michael Sandel, whom he characterizes as arguing that to have an existence means “to stand in midair and tell stories” (305). In a somewhat perplexing claim given Smith’s phenomenological argument, he says that we do not need stories but “open spaces where actual, concrete republican citizens can interact and discover their own natures and abilities, and where their shared being-with is something more than a story” (306). Public spaces and human narratives are not necessarily either/or choices, as the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, notably in Time and Narrative, and Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition make clear, but they do not enter into this discussion.
Smith’s book raises an issue, less about the insights that Cicero might bring to our own discussions of politics and political philosophy and more about how we advance as scholars in our readings of Cicero. The extensive work on Cicero is all but ignored. Smith’s citations of Cicero scholars are astonishingly few. The result is essentially a gloss on Cicero, in which questions of interpretation are neither addressed nor even recognized, and the contributions by scholars on Cicero’s philosophy, ethics, and oratory, as well as side issues that come up, such as on Stoicism, are ignored. As far as I can tell, there is no citation of any ancient source on Rome or Cicero other than Cicero. One can imagine a close reading of Cicero that provides a fresh interpretation (recognizing the shortcomings of previous approaches), but that does not happen either. Extended passages (or even sentences) from Cicero are rare, which means there is very little sustained engagement with, or communication to the reader about, Cicero’s actual words.
Cicero, specifically, and Roman political thought, generally, are fascinating because of their embeddedness in time. By that, I do not mean that the cave, to return to Smith’s language here, serves as an unfortunate limitation on thought. I mean that this embeddedness is deeply implicated in Roman thought—in Cicero’s understanding of the best constitution as one that evolves in time rather than as a Platonic ideal; his notion of a philosophical orator who is both informed by philosophy and necessarily embodies the thoughts and passions of the people, not because Cicero must appeal to what is “low” (244), as Smith suggests, but because those passions at once underlie and threaten the bonds of community; a persistent anxiety about the fraying of the res publica that intersects with his own questions about human mortality; a search for answers that are grounded in exempla from Roman history; and a fondness for the artifacts of human striving that speak to oneself as a being with memories. It is that Cicero who models how political philosophy as a phenomenology is an encounter with the contingencies, frailties, and experiences that define human existence.