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July 14, 2006
The passage below is from Cicero's late text De Officiis VII. The text was composed in haste shortly before Cicero's death. It was written in the year 44 BC, Cicero's last year alive, when he was 62 years old, and takes the form of a letter to his son with the same name. The essay discusses what is honor and what is expedient, and what to do when they conflict.
In the passage below Cicero is considering the means by which Roman Senators can gain the ability to win and hold the affections of our fellow-men:
But, of all motives, none is better adapted to secure influence and hold it fast than love; nothing is more foreign to that end than fear...But those who keep subjects in check by force would of course have to employ severity---masters, for example, toward their servants, when these cannot be held in control in any other way. But those who in a free state deliberately put themselves in a position to be feared are the maddest of the mad. For let the laws be never so much overborne by some one individual's power, let the spirit of freedom be never so intimidated, still sooner or later they assert themselves either through unvoiced public sentiment, or through secret ballots disposing of some high office of state. Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered. (V11 23 24)
Cicero was writing in dark times--when the Roman Senate was under threat from dictators such as Julius Caesar and before it became an empire under Augustus.
He describes Roman rule in terms of 'our government could be called more accurately a protectorate of the world than a dominion. This policy and practice we had begun gradually to modify even before Sulla's time; but since his victory we have departed from it altogether.'
Though Cicero's philosophy is conventionally seen as derivative and unoriginal he is once again being taken seriously as a moral and political philosopher. Since he subordinated philosophy to politics his philosophy had a political purpose: the defense, and if possible the improvement, of the Roman Republic. He held that virtuous character that had been the main attribute of Romans in the earlier days of Roman history, and that this loss of virtue was the cause of the Republic's difficulties.
He hoped that the leaders of Rome, especially in the Senate, would listen to his pleas to renew the Republic. This could only happen if the Roman elite chose to improve their characters and place commitments to individual virtue and social stability ahead of their desires for fame, wealth, and power. Having done this, the elite would enact legislation that would force others to adhere to similar standards, and the Republic would flourish once again.
Cicero, for all his defence of the Senate and the Republic was clearly capable of collapsing the distinction between wars of the self-defense of Rome and those of the expansion of Rome.
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