Ciceronian political moderation

I’ve been slowly, slowly reading through John Buchan’s posthumously published memoir Memory Hold-the-Door over the last couple of months. I’m sick for the third or fourth time since October, and while resting yesterday I dived back into Buchan’s book again and reached the point in his career when he entered politics, standing as a Conservative candidate for the Commons in 1911. Buchan:

My political experience at the time was nil, and my views were shallow and ill-informed—inclinations rather than principles. I believed profoundly in the possibilities of the Empire as a guardian of world peace, and as a factor in the solution of all our domestic problems, but I no longer accepted imperial federation, and I had little confidence in Mr. Chamberlain’s tariff policy. For socialism I had the distrust that I felt for all absolute creeds, and Marxism, to which I had given some attention, seemed to me to have an insecure speculative basis and to be purblind as a reading of history. On the other hand I wanted the community to use its communal strength when the facts justified it, and I believed in the progressive socialisation of the State, provided the freedom of the personality were assured. I had more sympathy with socialism than with orthodox liberalism, which I thought a barren strife about dogmas that at that time had only an antiquarian interest. But I was a Tory in the sense that I disliked change unless the need for it was amply proved, and that I desired to preserve continuity with the past and keep whatever of the old foundations were sound. As I used to put it in a fisherman's simile, if your back cast is poor your forward cast will be a mess.

There’s much to both agree and quibble with here—not least whether it’s even possible to have “freedom of the personality” under an ever more socialist state, though one has to forgive Buchan for having no idea just how bloated and all-smothering a bureaucracy could become—but the thing about Buchan is I know we could have a good-faith conversation about it. And I agree with most of the rest of it, especially the barrenness of liberalism and the need for continuity.

Buchan seems to have been ill-at-ease in the world of politics, not only because of his “inclinations” and his lack of striving ambition but because of his broad sympathies, fairmindedness, and honesty.

I had always felt that it was a citizen’s duty to find some form of public service, but I had no strong parliamentary ambitions. Nor was there any special cause at the moment which I felt impelled to plead. While I believed in party government and in party loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party’s defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent.

Ditto. This is actual political moderation, not the phony and elusive “centrism” promoted as the cure to our ills.

Buchan then quotes a passage from Macaulay’s History of England that describes the political stance of the 1st Marquess of Halifax, a political attitude that Buchan owned he “was apt to fall into”:

His place was on the debatable ground between the hostile divisions of the community, and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged was the party which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment he had the nearest view. He was therefore always severe upon his violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector.

This description of his inclinations and positions, and most especially the passage from Macaulay, brought to mind Finley Hooper’s summary of Cicero’s politics, one I’ve often felt describes my own “inclinations” and that I now try consciously to hold myself to. Hooper, in his Roman Realities:

Cicero was a man of the middle class all his life. He opposed the selfish interests of a senatorial oligarchy and the selfish interests of the Populares, who had their way in the Tribal Assembly. When one side appeared to have the upper hand, he leaned toward the other. He was very conscious of a decadent ruling class which insisted on its right to rule regardless of whether it ruled well or not. The demagogues of Clodius’s stripe were even more frightening to him, and most of the time their activities kept him estranged from the people.

Hear hear. But while both Cicero and Buchan were sensitive to the cultural rot and decadence that manifested itself among the political elite and the wider culture, both would also aver that politics is not the solution. In Cicero’s own, words: “Electioneering and the struggle for offices is an altogether wretched practice.”

I’ve been savoring Memory Hold-the-Door, a warmly written and often poignant book, and I look forward to finishing it. And the above is not the only distinctly Ciceronian passage. Buchan, no mean classicist, describes his friend and publisher Tommie Nelson, who was killed in the First World War, this way:

His death made a bigger hole in the life of Scotland than that of any other man of his years. . . . In the case of others we might regret the premature loss to the world of some peculiar talent; with Tommie we mourned especially the loss of a talent for living worthily and helping others to do likewise. It is the kind of loss least easy to forget, and yet one which soon comes to be contemplated without pain, for he had succeeded most fully in life.

This could come straight from Cicero’s De Amicitia (On Friendship), another favorite essay of mine from late in his life. Interesting how a long life and nearness to an unexpected death sharpened the insights of both men.

For more of Cicero on politics, see this election day post from three years ago. For Buchan’s nightmare vision of individual moral rot leading to civilizational decline, see here.

Cicero on friendship and falsity

Kevin D Williamson, in his newsletter today, has a trenchant examination of disordered priorities. Specifically, when we mistake “second things” for “first things” we fail to attain either, as in discarding principles for political expediency. He reflects at length on lying and invokes Cicero’s De Amicitia, “On Friendship,” from which we get the principle Esse quam videri—To be rather than to seem. Cicero, speaking through the main character of the dialogue, Laelius:

“Many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue. Such men delight in flattery, and, when a complimentary remark is fashioned to suit their fancy, they think the empty phrase is proof of their own merits. There is nothing, therefore, in a friendship in which one of the parties to it does not wish to hear the truth and the other is ready to lie.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XXIV

Those who don’t want to hear the truth, and those who are prepared to lie—a familiar arrangement, but not friendship. It’s more akin to prostitution, as Cicero makes clear in an allusion to a comedy by Terence, in which a prostitute uses hyperbole to praise the prowess of a recent john. The same example was picked up Dante, who placed the prostitute in the circle of the flatterers in Inferno.

These are perversions of friendship. Elsewhere in De Amicitia, Cicero, through the speaker, Laelius, writes prescriptively:

“Therefore, let this law be established in friendship: neither ask dishonorable things, nor do them, if asked.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XII

Truth is both the basis and the fruit of real friendship, which is founded on virtue. “Virtue,” Cicero writes, “both creates the bond of friendship and perserves it,” but can’t be gotten by a mercenary pursuit of either virtue or friendship.

“But [friendship] is nothing other than the great esteem and affection felt for him who inspires that sentiment, and its is not sought because of material need or for the sake of material gain. Nevertheless even this blossoms forth from friendship, although you did not make it your aim.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XXVII

Williamson also invokes CS Lewis in this passage of his newsletter, and while he did not mention this particular line of Lewis’s, the following from Mere Christianity inevitably came to mind:

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation along as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

Be, don’t seem, and you might find that, simply by being, you begin to seem.

The translation of De Amicitia above is that of WA Falconer, from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. You can read the whole thing here. An excellent recent translation is that of Philip Freeman for the Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. Read the entirety of Williamson’s newsletter here. Come for the dachshund puppy story, stay for the razor sharp Cicero-inspired examination of the sacrifice of truth for political gain. It’s worth your while.

How to Run a Country

Detail from Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, by Benjamin West

Yesterday I read How to Run a Country, a wide-ranging collection of excerpts from the political writings of Cicero and part of Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. I’ve reviewed another volume from the series, Cicero’s How to Grow Old, here before. While How to Grow Old translated a single long treatise, How to Run a Country anthologizes bits and pieces from Cicero’s works and organizes them thematically, covering such topics as leadership, corruption, and war.

So far I haven’t found the anthology or selection volumes of the series as fulfilling as those that translate a complete single text—those like How to Grow Old, How to Win an Election, a practical treatise by Cicero’s brother Quintus, or another favorite, Cicero’s How to Be a Friend—and as How to Run a Country was one of the very first volumes published in this series it’s clear that the series hadn’t nailed the format yet. But it’s still very good. How to Run a Country, thanks especially to the short, thoughtful introduction by editor and translator Philip Freeman, gives the reader a good precis of Cicero’s political thought in a format that can be read in about forty-five minutes.

Cicero as traditionalist, moderate, and statesman

In his book Roman Realities, Finley Hooper writes that

Cicero was a man of the middle class all his life. He opposed the selfish interests of a senatorial oligarchy and the selfish interests of the Populares, who had their way in the Tribal Assembly. When one side appeared to have the upper hand, he leaned toward the other. He was very conscious of a decadent ruling class which insisted on its right to rule regardless of whether it ruled well or not. The demagogues of Clodius’s stripe were even more frightening to him, and most of the time their activities kept him estranged from the people.

Freeman, in his introduction to How to Run a Country, describes Cicero as “a moderate conservative,” though I might have said traditionalist instead of or as well as moderate, and notes that this is “an increasingly rare breed in our modern world.” Cicero “believed in working with other parties for the good of his country and its people. Rather than a politician, his ideas are those of a statesman, another category whose ranks today grow ever more diminished.”

I emphasize the traditionalism of Cicero’s thought because, as we will see below, he was keenly aware of the collapse of tradition and his existence as a relict in a decaying republic. As Hooper notes elsewhere in his book, “The old Roman days of honor and virtue were almost beyond recall to all save men like Cicero.”

Freeman’s ten lessons to take from Cicero

In his introduction, Freeman offers the following ten-point summary of Cicero’s key political ideas. I only explore a few of them in the quotations below, but it should be clear how each reflects Cicero’s broader philosophy. I include the ten points without the paragraph-length explanations Freeman provides after each:

1. There are universal laws that govern the conduct of human affairs.

2. The best form of government embraces a balance of powers.

3. Leaders should be of exceptional character and integrity.

4. Keep your friends close—and your enemies closer.

5. Intelligence is not a dirty word.

6. Compromise is the key to getting things done.

7. Don’t raise taxes—unless you absolutely have to.

8. Immigration makes a country stronger.

9. Never start an unjust war.

10. Corruption destroys a nation.

Rather than write a longer, more traditional review—and because this is election day—I want to give most of the space here to Cicero himself, and I’ll conclude with the ten lessons in politics that Freeman argues we can learn from Cicero’s thought. Despite the often vast differences in cultural climate and basic assumptions about the world, the specific issues Cicero and his contemporaries faced are still relevant, and still offer us something to learn and reflect upon.

All quotations below are Freeman’s translations from How to Run a Country.

What we fight for

To continue on the thought of tradition and custom, in Pro Sestio (In Defense of Sestius), a legal case defending a friend of his brought up on charges by political enemies, Cicero describes the purposes for which the Republic was founded, what kind of dangers threaten it, and what kind of men it takes to defend the Republic:

The founding principles of our Republic, the essence of peace with honor, the values that our leaders should defend and guard with their very lives if necessary are these: respecting religion, discovering the will of the gods, supporting the power of the magistrates, honoring the authority of the senate, obeying the law, valuing tradition, upholding the courts and their verdicts, practicing integrity, defending the provinces and our allies, and standing up for our country, our military, and our treasury.

Building on these “founding principles,” in De Officiis (On Duties), a philosophical treatise from late in his life, Cicero describes the job of the state and the things it should and should not handle—especially when it comes to the perennial interests of the revolutionaries and demagogues:

Whoever governs a country must first see to it that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. When Philippus was a tribune, he proposed a ruinous law to distribute land, though when his bill was voted down he took it very well and accepted defeat graciously. However, when he was defending the bill he pandered shamelessly to the common people, saying that there weren’t two thousand people left in the city who owned any property. That kind of hyperbole must be condemned, along with any proposals advocating an equal distribution of land. . . .

As for those politicians who pretend they are friends of the common people and try to pass laws redistributing property and drive people out of their homes or champion legislation forgiving loans, I say they are undermining the very foundations of our state. They are destroying social harmony, which cannot exist when you take away money from some to give it to others. They are also destroying fairness, which vanishes when people cannot keep what rightfully belongs to them.

On a similar note, from Pro Sestio again:

For among the crowds are those who would destroy our country through revolution and upheaval, either because they feel guilty about their own misdeeds and fear punishment, or because they are deranged enough to long for sedition and civil discord, or because of their own financial mismanagement they prefer to bring the whole country down in flames rather than burn alone. When such people find leaders to help them carry out their wicked plans, the Republic is tossed about on the waves. When this happens, those helmsmen who guide our country must be vigilant and use all their skill and diligence to preserve the principles I mentioned above and steer our country safely home with peace and honor.

What it takes

Cicero uses the “helmsman” metaphor over and over again in his writing on politics; it appears multiple times just in this short collection, and it is a useful one, evoking as it does the manifold and constantly shifting dangers that threaten the body politic and the myriad skills required of the captain of a vessel. In Pro Sestio, Cicero provides the following shortlist of necessary skills: “Those who would be guardians of such important principles must be people of great courage, great ability, and great resolve.”

To return to the helmsman metaphor, Cicero develops the picture in greater detail in discussing the art of compromise in a letter to his friend Lentulus Spinther:

In politics it is irresponsible to take an unwavering stand when circumstances are always evolving and good men change their minds. Clinging to the same opinion no matter the cost has never been considered a virtue among statesmen. When at sea, it is best to run before a storm if your ship can’t make it to harbor. But if you can find safety by tacking back and forth, only a fool would hold a straight course rather than change directions and reach home. In the same way, a wise statesman should make peace with honor for his country the ultimate goal, as I have often said. It is our vision that must remain constant, not our words.

And what else? Naturally the most gifted and influential speaker of his day has ideas about the ability of a statesman to communicate. From De Oratore (On the Orator):

If a person has not acquired a deep knowledge of all the necessary disciplines involved in oratory, his speech will be an endless prattle of empty and silly words. An orator must be able to choose the right language and arrange his words carefully. He must also understand the full range of emotions that nature has given us, for the ability to rouse or calm a crowd is the greatest test of both the understanding and the practical ability of a speaker. An orator also needs a certain charm and with the cultured ways of a gentleman, and the ability to strike fiercely when attacking an opponent. In addition he needs a subtle grace and sophistication. Finally, an orator must have a keen mind capable of remembering a vast array of relevant precedents and examples from history, along with a thorough knowledge of the law and civil statutes.

This goes deeper than mere rhetorical technique—the speaker’s manner and style of speaking not only should be but is illustrative of his character. Food for thought.

Why we fail

Good men are made, not born, but in some generations it is easier to cultivate virtue. Elsewhere in De Officiis, he writes “Indeed, when you praise the integrity of a man you are also praising the age in which he lived.”

As I mentioned, Cicero lived among a decayed and corrupted generation in a decaying and corrupted Republic, and bore with him a lifelong cognizance of the fact. In De Re Publica (On the State), which only survives in fragments, Cicero takes this line from the Roman poet Ennius—“The Roman state is founded on ancient customs and its men”—and meditates on how the Republic has failed and who is to blame:

The poet who wrote these words so brief and true seems to me to have heard them from a divine oracle. For neither men by themselves without a state based on strong customs nor traditions without men to defend them could have established and maintained a republic such as ours whose power stretches so far and wide. Before our time, the cherished customs of our forefathers produced exceptional and admirable men who preserved the ways and institutions of our ancestors.

But now our republic looks like a beautiful painting faded with age. Our generation has not only failed to restore the colors of this masterpiece, but we have not even bothered to preserve its general form and outline. What now remains of the ancient ways of our country the poet declares we were founded upon? These traditions have so sunk into oblivion that we neither practice them nor even remember what they were. And what shall I say about the men? For the reason our customs have passed away is that the people who once upheld them no longer exist. We should be put on trial as if for a capital crime to explain why this disaster has happened. But there is no defense we can give. Our country survives only in words, not as anything of substance. We have lost it all. We have only ourselves to blame.

Freeman titles this excerpt “Cicero’s Epilogue: The Fallen State.”

More if you’re interested

I recommend How to Run and Country and all of the other volumes of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, especially those by Cicero. I return to Cicero again and again because of the truths—the “permanent things”—that he tapped into and related both in word and example. I think it is especially important to return to the thought of men like Cicero as our culture goes more and more overtly to war with the truth. As you might gather from the quotation I chose to end on—and the one that Freeman ends his collection with—I am not sanguine about the future. But I do not despair, either.

I explore this poignant mixture of grief, resignation, and paradoxical hope—and hint a bit at where to look for hope—in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, which dramatizes the day politics and tyranny finally caught up to this champion of the Republic. I hope you’ll check it out, and that you’ll read it in light of the real man’s thought.

I also recommend Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, and any of the works by Cicero quoted here, especially De Officiis.

How to Grow Old

I originally wrote and posted this review of De Senectute on Goodreads after I read it in March of 2017. I have fond memories of carrying this little book in my pocket on a trip to the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia for my daughter’s birthday. Now, three years later, with two more children, a lot more grey on my chin, and the Riverbanks Zoo closed to prevent the spread of coronavirus, I revisited Cicero’s wonderful meditation and found it just as uplifting, enlightening, and challenging as before. I share my slightly emended original review with y’all in hopes that it will be beneficial and that some of y’all will check the book out.

“Those who lack within themselves the means for living a blessed and happy life will find any age painful.”

Late last year I found grey in the stubble on my chin. This year I’ve started sprouting grey hairs at my temples. Time and age catch up to us all, and for modern people—to judge by a perennially fruitful field of advertising—the discovery of grey hair, or crow’s feet, or a newly creaky joint, marks the beginning of a crisis. The same was apparently true in the ancient world, judging by the forceful arguments against bemoaning old age in Cicero’s De Senectute, loosely rendered here as How to Grow Old.

Cicero wrote On Old Age in early 44 BC, as he entered his 60s. One would imagine Cicero had more to worry about than growing old—in the twenty years since saving the Republic from the Catiline conspiracy, he had found himself marginalized and finally ousted from the Roman political scene. His friends or allies in the Civil War fell one by one as Caesar, whom he steadfastly opposed, carried all before him in the Civil War. Finally, his beloved daughter Tullia had died the year before. Cicero devoted this time to philosophical reflection, completing this book—one in a rapidly appearing series of works—just before Caesar’s assassination, which began a fresh round of strife that resulted in Cicero's murder.

Cicero set his dialogue in the illustrious past, before present troubles, which still intruded most notably in his choice of speaker: Cato the Elder, the revered great-grandfather of Cicero's sometime political ally Cato, who had disemboweled himself in Utica in 46 BC rather than be captured, forgiven, and used as a human prop for Caesar's propaganda purposes. The elder Cato had fought in the Second Punic War alongside Scipio Africanus—whose adopted grandson is one of Cato's young conversation mates in the dialogue—and lived well into his eighties. He lived on as a Roman ideal to more than just his great-grandson, and Cicero here makes him a spokesman for wise and dignified old age.

Much of Cato's advice rotates around the Stoic poles of Nature and Reason (already giving this book a significant edge over most current self-help advice on growing older). The right use of Reason, Nature’s great gift to man, brings man into alignment with Nature, and enables a life of virtue. This seemingly abstract idea helps make sense of much of the misery that the aging experience, and points to the real truth about the challenge of growing older: it all comes back to character.

Cato tackles four major objections to aging: the denial of an active life (both physical and mental), the weakening of the body, the deprivation of sensual pleasure (especially sex), and—the big one—the ever nearing threat of death.

The answers to these objections stem from a deeply wise observation—aging well begins in youth. A once athletic man who mourns himself as dead when he loses the spryness of youth has had his priorities wrong from the beginning. A person mourning the inability to fulfill all their appetites never really knew what those appetites were for, and allowed them to master him. And people who fear death will never really be happy in any age, because death can come at any time—it is simply harder to ignore in old age. “Since death threatens us at every hour,” Cato asks, “how can anyone who is afraid of it have a steadfast soul?”

Cicero sprinkles imagery from nature (by way of Nature) liberally, particularly of the seasons. Granted that a person has lived virtuously as a youth and can approach aging properly, he will see that old age is simply another season, a season with pleasures, duties, and honors of its own. Cicero may not use these words, but a lifestyle appropriate to or befitting old age—Reason corresponding to Nature—is key. If weakness of the body is appropriate to old age, so is the wisdom of accumulated years. The fretful elderly who keep Viagra in business are, in Cicero’s mind, still mastered by an appetite appropriate to an earlier season, and create their own misery by their unwillingness to appreciate old age on its own terms.

Old age’s honors include respect and wisdom, time for simply pleasurable work (for Cato, farming and learning Greek), study, thought, and conversation, and some much-appreciated stability after the stormy passions of youth. Of course, respect is not guaranteed—one thinks of the way the elderly are shunted to the side as quickly and efficiently as possible in our world—but a life well lived is its own reward, and will result in a person calm and content in the face of death. The approach of death—which is one of the things appropriate to old age, like the fall of ripe fruit from a tree—does not rob old age of its value, but rather gives it value by focusing one’s priorities. Lust and greed should fall away (“What could be more ridiculous than for a traveler to add to his baggage at the end of a journey?”) in favor of reflection on past blessings. (I was reminded of his assertion in an old legal case that gratitude “is not only the greatest, but is also the parent of all the other virtues.”) Cato concludes his arguments with a really interesting and moving discourse on his belief in eternal life.

I wasn’t really bothered to find grey hair on my head—on the contrary, I think it’s really interesting to watch it spread—but a lot of people are, and as our culture values youth and vitality to an idolatrous extent, On Old Age is a refreshing celebration of age.

Philip Freeman’s translation of De Senectute is free and brisk and a delight to read, as I’m sure Cicero’s original (which is presented on the facing page for one to pick through and compare) is in the Latin. His short introduction offers a simple breakdown of the main benefits of aging that Cato extols in the body of the dialogue. A few pages of succinct, helpful endnotes identify people or explain allusions within the dialogue.

* * *

If you enjoyed this review, please give Philip Freeman’s wonderful translation a read, or check out the other volumes in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series from Princeton UP, including another of my favorites, Cicero’s De Amicitia or How to Be a Friend. And please check out my novella about Cicero’s death, The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Thanks for reading!

Cicero on bad leaders

Detail from Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari, 1888

From Cicero’s philosophical dialogue De Legibus (On the Laws), Book III, XIV:

“Corrupt leaders are all the more pernicious to the republic because not only do they harbor their own vices but they spread them among the citizenry; they do harm not only because they are themselves corrupt but because they corrupt others—and they do more harm by the example they set than by their own transgressions.”

Let the reader understand.

I expand on thoughts like these in fictional form in The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, which I wrote in the summer of 2016 and has only grown more starkly relevant since. But be forewarned—my vision in that book is neither a partisan one (whoever you think I’m thinking about as I write this post, it’s not them) nor a hopeful one.

Cicero on eloquence without wisdom

Cicero Denounces Catiline, Cesare Maccari

In De Inventione (literally, On Invention), a handbook on oratory that Cicero wrote while still a young lawyer, he recorded this thought on good speech without wisdom and wisdom without good speech:

“Wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of communities, but eloquence without wisdom is, in most instances, extremely harmful and never beneficial.”

— Cicero

It's worth considering both aspects of any proposals or arguments we make politically, and one has to wonder what Cicero would make of a world in which neither wisdom nor eloquence play a role in our public discourse.