like De oratore, De re publica looks in many directions. The two dialogues create a web of connections not only with the past (historical, literary, philosophical) of both Greece and Rome, but with each other and with the broader intellectual currents of contemporary Rome. Such connections are not easily separated from one another: if the Somnium is in part a response to Lucretius and Epicureanism (as is De re publica as a whole), that contemporary dialogue also draws in Ennius, Callimachus, and Homer—literary traditions both of early Rome and of Greece, the claim to poetic inspiration and the blending of inherited models with literary and stylistic innovations—as well as reflecting ties to Plato and, through the use of the Phaedrus, through Plato back to Cicero’s own De oratore. Both dialogues claim Platonic inspiration, either in Cicero’s voice or in that of his characters, but in both of them that source of inspiration is at once praised, questioned, and mocked. These dialogues have high literary and philosophical aspirations; but both also call the practicability of those aspirations into question. And both employ settings that are at once not only vehicles for the representation of Platonic dialogue but also objects of historical scrutiny as themselves part of the intellectual development of Rome.
Of the two dialogues, De oratore is considerably more demanding than De re publica, and not merely because the latter dialogue is incomplete: in many ways, De oratore does the hard work of establishing a portrait of Roman intellectual life, knowledge of which De re publica can then assume. De oratore is far more concerned than De re publica with the value of Platonic philosophy and Socratic argument: the earlier dialogue often refers to Plato and Socrates, and repeatedly questions the utility of Platonic/Socratic ideals in Rome. De oratore is far more concerned than De re publica to establish the intellectual as well as the social and political credentials of its speakers: the first book emphasizes the visits of Crassus, Antonius, and Scaevola to converse with Greek philosophers and rhetoricians in the east, while in the second book not only does Cicero insist on the Greek learning of Crassus and Antonius, but Antonius himself goes out of his way to demonstrate his competence in Aristotelian rhetorical theory, and in the third Crassus gives an astonishingly learned history of Greek intellectual life from the time of the Seven Sages down to the second century. In De re publica, on the other hand, while several of the participants (Tubero, Philus, and Scipio himself) have considerable familiarity with Stoicism through Panaetius and have talked about constitutional theory with Polybius, and while Philus, Scipio, and Laelius actually heard the Carneadean antilogy of 155, the dialogue gives little reason to believe that Greek philosophy is one of their major concerns. As literate and intelligent people, they know something about it, but they have no anxiety about seeming inexpert. They are well-educated Roman aristocrats, and that is all they want or need.
In general, De oratore is far more engaged with the intellectual quarrels and concerns of the second-century Greek philosophical schools than is De re publica, because Cicero, in his earliest dialogue, is trying to create through his speakers a narrative of Roman intellectual development: his accounts of Crassus and Antonius, and their accounts of their own studies and experiences, combine to show that by the beginning of the first century (and going back to their visits to Greece in the late second century) Roman statesmen were conversant with the philosophical and rhetorical debates of their day, were perfectly capable of understanding and assessing the issues, and were able to subordinate their newly acquired Greek learning to the needs and values of Rome. The story De oratore tells is the exact opposite of Horace’s Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (Epist. 2.1.156): in Cicero’s version, it is the Romans who subdue Greek thought (as well as the Greeks themselves) and bend it to Roman purposes.
That description of the intellectual world of De oratore is an oversimplification: Cicero also deliberately complicates his account of Crassus and his friends by making it clear that his idealizing description of his protagonists is of questionable validity. Such ambivalence and ambiguity are, remarkably, almost completely absent from what survives of De re publica. While the characters of De oratore make fruitful use of their double role as Roman aristocrats and participants in a re-enactment of Platonic dialogue and create a significant tension between the two, the characters of De re publica almost certainly do not see themselves as playing Platonic roles: they have of course read the Republic (and other dialogues), and they are aware that they are talking about a subject that Plato wrote about; Scipio in particular is aware of the similarities and differences between his own dream and the Myth of Er. At the same time, however, there is an ironic distance in Cicero’s (and Scipio’s) attitude that replaces the passionate rejection of the Platonic Socrates in De oratore. Plato and Socrates do not concern Scipio and Laelius as acutely as they concern Antonius and Crassus.
There are two kinds of explanation for the different attitudes of the two dialogues toward Greek philosophy and learning. On a textual level, De re publica, as a sequel, relies on the reader’s familiarity with De oratore. That is true not simply because of the detailed links between the two dialogues discussed above in Chapter 8, but because De oratore has already established in so many ways the place of Greek philosophy and rhetoric in Rome. After reading De oratore, as it were, Scipio and his friends no longer need to worry about the Greeks—and for the most part, they do not. On a historical level, however, the relationship between the two dialogues is quite different: Scipio and his friends are discussing politics nearly forty years before Crassus and Antonius and their friends meet in Tusculum in 91, and nearly twenty years before Crassus and Antonius visited Athens to talk to philosophers and rhetoricians. Scipio and Laelius represent an earlier generation and an earlier stage in Roman intellectual life—one that has not yet begun to worry about the cleverness of the Greeks. It is no accident that Scipio in Book 1 downplays his knowledge of Greek political theory and that the intellectual attainments of Scipio, Laelius, and Philus are described only in Cicero’s words in the preface to Book 3, and quite briefly at that.
But while Cicero’s manipulations of the historical settings of De oratore and De re publica are very important for understanding his construction of Roman intellectual history, one needs also to consider the content and argument of the two dialogues about oratory and political theory, respectively. Again, however, the two are intertwined, both in method and in substance. In each case, Platonic arguments against rhetoric and politics and in favor of an ideal state are disparaged as inappropriate to a genuine human society and to the practical needs of Roman public life, but the anti-Platonic refrain is not the main focus of Cicero’s argument in either dialogue; rather, they are both directed not against classical ethics but against Hellenistic technicality. The reductive rules of Hermagorean rhetoric are described as mere propaedeutics to the serious aspects of public speaking; the rigid schematism of the Polybian cycle of constitutions is rapidly shown to be inadequate. In each case, moreover, the corrective to Greek attempts to make these subjects rational and reproducible lies in Cicero’s emphasis on individual experience within Roman traditional wisdom. In both De oratore and De re publica, Greek theory provides a useful starting point for discussion and no more; in both dialogues, both in Cicero’s prefaces and in his characters’ discussions, learning matters, but moral commitment and political participation matter a great deal more.
It is not a very great exaggeration, in fact, to say that both dialogues reject theory of any kind in favor of practical wisdom. That is clearly true in De re publica. Scipio dismisses his own account of constitutional theory at the end of Book 1 by criticizing himself for talking like a professor instead of a senator, and most of what he says about constitutions has no bearing on the rest of the dialogue; and while Laelius and Scipio in particular at various times make use of Stoic theories of ethics, they do so tacitly, presenting their ideas instead as the product of traditional Roman belief, not of philosophers’ wranglings. The only contemporary or near-contemporary philosopher whose ideas play a significant role is the Academic Carneades—and he is reviled in De re publica for his attack on justice as much as he is praised as a rhetorician in De oratore. That represents another way in which the two dialogues are intertwined and in fact seem to reverse normal expectations of what works on rhetoric or politics should do: De oratore says virtually nothing explicit about the need for the good orator to be morally good, and instead concentrates on the kinds of knowledge the orator needs (Crassus) and the practical aspects of success in public speaking and in court (Antonius). In contrast, De re publica says virtually nothing about the need for the statesman to be a convincing orator—something Crassus emphasizes at the outset of De oratore—and instead emphasizes the need for moral character in the successful statesman. Each dialogue assumes the other: in order to make moral sense, De oratore needs the ethical aspects of De re publica; in order to create political success, De re publica requires the practical skills of De oratore. Orator and statesman are two sides of the same Ciceronian coin.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the close relationship between oratory and statesmanship and between the two dialogues comes from comparison of Antonius’ definition of the statesman with Crassus’ definition of the orator. Near the beginning of his speech at the end of Book 1 of De oratore, as part of his reduction of the importance of wide knowledge to the orator, Antonius gives a definition of the statesman, one of a number of definitions that progressively limit the scope of the final subject defined in the series, oratory itself. The statesman, “the person who has brought his experience, knowledge, and enthusiasm to the direction of the res publica” (1.211), is defined as follows:
The person who grasps how the advantage of the res publica is procured and increased and makes use of that knowledge is the one who should be considered the guide of the res publica (rei publicae rectorem) and the source of public counsel (consilii publici auctorem).
The orator, by contrast, is defined by Antonius merely as someone capable of using pleasant and effective language in court and in public (1.214). But when Crassus in Book 3 is considering what kinds of philosophical training are useful for the orator, he rejects Epicureanism, “the philosophy that has taken up the advocacy of pleasure,” because it is so far removed from what he has in mind (3.63):
It is far distant from the man we’re looking for and whom we want to be the source of public counsel (auctorem publici consilii) and a leader in the guidance of the state (regendae civitatis ducem) and the first man in wisdom and eloquence in the senate, before the people, and in court.
To standard definitions of what an orator does—to speak convincingly in the three most important venues for rhetorical performance—Crassus has prefixed the same words that Antonius had used for the statesman—a definition of the orator in terms of public responsibility and civic function very different from Crassus’ usual emphasis on what an orator needs to know rather than what he ought to say.
In context, the desire to dismiss Epicureanism as a useful philosophy is what leads Crassus to enlarge the public role of oratory; but the juxtaposition of Epicureanism with statesmanship also looks ahead to De re publica. Other than this passage, the only references to Epicureanism in De oratore are two linked jokes made by Antonius that involve glancing remarks about those who prefer voluptas (1.222, 226), and not even here is Epicurus named. It is in De re publica that Epicureanism becomes important, notably in Cicero’s preface and in the conclusion of the Somnium, and it is almost certainly because of, and in reply to, Lucretius that Cicero’s rejection of Epicureanism is so emphatic. Crassus’ expansion of the orator’s role to include public service anticipates the importance of public service in De re publica (although, as noted above, oratory itself plays no role in the discussions of the rector), and the later dialogue as a whole is structured to respond to De rerum natura and the Epicurean rejection of public life and civic duty. That emphasis on the interrelationship between the city and the citizen would have been central to De re publica even without Lucretius, and one of Cicero’s early references to the dialogue-in-progress describes it as de optimo statu civitatis et de optimo cive (QFr. 3.5.1); but the change from nine books to six in emulation of Lucretius gave much greater sharpness to Cicero’s response to Lucretius and to Epicureanism.
In its final form, De re publica displays two different structures moving in opposite directions. On the one hand, it progresses from the broad description of forms of government through the particular institutions that reinforce it to the very specific role of the individual leader in making it work. On the other hand, it moves outward from the real and practical concerns of government to the ideal political structure of the universe itself. By the end of the dialogue, we have a double vision: the real Rome in all its historical particularity, and a Platonic ideal Rome embedded in the structure of the universe; in just the same way, the real and particular individuals who work in and through the real Rome are revealed to be immortal souls living in a cosmic society outside of time. Similarly, on one level De re publica is a pragmatic work of political sociology, dealing, particularly in the central books, with the relationship between social institutions and individual character and in the structure of the whole dialogue and in particular in the Somnium, he offers a moral eschatology that denies the materialism of Epicureanism while turning the structure of De rerum natura on its head.
Cicero’s response to Lucretius and to Epicureanism is not particularly surprising: not only was Epicurean withdrawal the most conspicuous target for a work celebrating political engagement, but Lucretius’ poem was a formidable and eloquent representation of that philosophy. Nor is Cicero’s rejection (at times reluctant rejection, to be sure) of Platonic idealism and of Plato’s concomitant scorn for the necessary compromises of civic life at all surprising either. Again, it should be recalled that Cicero was a close student of Plato’s life (as revealed in his letters) as well as of the dialogues. What is worth emphasizing, however, is that in both cases Cicero combines a basic philosophical stance of skepticism toward dogmatic philosophies with a similarly tempered appreciation of his opponents as literary texts: literary admiration is combined with an ironic distance in the same way that the attempt to create the perfect orator or statesman is balanced by skeptical doubt. All these aspects are fused most tightly in the Somnium, as discussed in the previous chapter: the Somnium is a philosophical response both to Plato’s Myth of Er and to Lucretius’ materialist universe; at the same time its preface, alluding to Ennius’ dream of Homer and thus obliquely to Lucretius’ use of Ennius’ dream, claims literary inspiration, drawing on a tradition going back at least to Callimachus, while simultaneously showing the self-contradictory nature of Ennius’ dream. We are asked to believe Scipio’s vision and to question it, to place it in a literary tradition and to view that tradition itself as illusory. No wonder Africanus needs Platonic authority to bolster his belief in his own soul’s immortality—an authority whom Cicero consistently undercuts.
Scipio’s dream, with its multiple sets of allusions and frames of reference, is perhaps the most complex episode in either De oratore or De re publica, and in that way it serves as a suitable conclusion for the pair of dialogues. Through its allusion to Ennius’ Callimachean dream, it is a dream of literary inspiration; but through its content it is a dream of political inspiration. It comes at the end, as a retroactive explanation of Scipio’s understanding of civic order and moral government, but it is prospectively an exhortation, like Cicero’s own preface, to the next generation of readers (or hearers, within the dialogue) to restore an order that risks extinction. It looks back to traditions of Greek literature and philosophy, but through the generations of Scipio’s ancestors it looks back to a Roman tradition of public service.
The Somnium looks back in time, as does the dialogue which it concludes: within the dialogue, it looks back from 129 to 149, seeking the moment of Scipio’s political inspiration; De re publica as a whole represents Cicero himself (age roughly 54) looking back to the moment before the death of his protagonist Scipio (age 56). Both De oratore and De re publica are constantly looking backward in two or even more directions. Quite obviously, they look back to the Greek intellectual traditions which have, to some extent, shaped the way Romans look at questions of ethics and public life, and within that backward glance there are three points of focus: the recent scholarship of the Hellenistic age; the origins of philosophy in the modern sense in Socrates and Plato; and the genuine and unreflective natural wisdom of the Seven Sages. The dialogues also look back to earlier stages of the Roman intellectual tradition, and again one can distinguish three important moments. The earliest is represented by the Twelve Tables, by Aelius Catus, by sages like Curius and Coruncanius, and by instinctively wise statesmen like Lucius Iunius Brutus; it is a world of natural wisdom parallel to, but independent of, the early Greek tradition. The second is the period of the dramatic date of the dialogues, the moment (or series of moments) of Roman intellectual engagement with Greece, including both Scipio, Laelius, and the Carneadean encounter, on the one hand and Crassus, Antonius, and the debates with philosophers on the other. The third is the moment immediately following the dramatic dates of the dialogues: the sudden deaths of Scipio and Crassus, symbolizing a much greater loss, the loss of the res publica mourned by Cicero in the preface to De re publica Book 5.
The multiple historical narratives, explicit and implicit, in De oratore and De re publica are not readily compatible with one another. There is a double narrative of the relationship between Greek and Roman thought, in one version of which the (Greek) history of rhetoric or political theory is gradually subordinated, like Greece itself, to Roman purposes; put more positively, it is the story of the great tradition being passed on from Greece to Rome. At the same time, however, the history of Rome is made parallel to the traditions of Greece: that is to say, the native Roman tradition is shown to convey values and social norms that are independent of and at least equal to those of the Greeks. But De oratore and De re publica, given their settings and background, are scarcely triumphalist in tone: death, decline, and failure loom large in both dialogues. Given the context in which Cicero was writing, of course, a degree of gloom is scarcely surprising: it would be much more surprising for anyone in Rome in this period not to be aware of the problems of politics and decline. What is striking is less the substance of the dialogues than the complexity of tone—intellectual and national pride combined with political despair—that Cicero manages to achieve.
In part by using Platonic form with highly un-Platonic substance, Cicero sets up a set of contrasts, both between himself and Plato and between the traditions of Greek letters and Roman history: Greek philosophy and rhetoric, since Plato’s time, have become perhaps less elegant, but more useful—in fact, more Roman—in their emphasis on experience and history. Thus Aristotle’s pupils have clear ideas about the ideal state, but equally clear ideas about the limited particular circumstances in which it is possible and about conditions which throw it off course. But at the same time that Greeks have been getting more Roman, Romans have become more Greek, both through dominating the Greeks themselves politically and militarily and through the moral corruption that has come with power. Cicero’s vision in De oratore and De re publica is distinctly double: a proud statement of Roman cultural achievement through and over the Greeks and a sense of Rome’s simultaneous political rise and moral fall. And nothing serves to illuminate the complexity of Cicero’s vision of historical change—in political development, in intellectual history, and in moral decline—so much as the unchanging form of the Platonic City in and against which he writes.
Cicero’s dialogues, in short, use a Greek form to examine the Roman present by making that present the result of two parallel processes: the first is the historical development of institutions in Rome itself, and the second is the set of intellectual developments starting from Plato that permitted Cicero to reflect on and explain the first. The deliberate juxtaposition of Greek unworldliness and Roman practicality, the deeply historical sense of inquiry into origins, causes, and the processes of change and order make the reader reflect not only on the present moment but on the problems of literary representation of the present moment. In viewing his literary and philosophical endeavors themselves as a contribution to political and moral life Cicero himself makes this fairly explicit: to reflect on Plato is to reflect on Rome.
There is another question, of course, that haunts Cicero’s exploration of the combination of intellectual and political rise and moral decline: when did things go wrong? The answer to that, in both dialogues, is very clear: it was the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus and its aftermath. In De re publica that is straightforward: the dialogue takes place only four years after Tiberius’ tribunate, and Cicero blamed his associates and his brother for the death of Scipio himself. In De oratore, Cicero almost completely elides the last two decades of the second century in his accounts of oratory and politics, presumably in order to make a closer connection between the crisis of 91 and the Gracchan upheavals: as discussed earlier, there is virtually no mention of Marius, none at all of the crisis of the Jugurthine War or the tribunates of Saturninus. The crisis of 91 is essentially a twin of the crisis of the late 130s, and the death of Crassus in a sense participates in the same tragic moment as the death of Scipio.
This naïve narrative of a single tragic moment, of course, is not truthful, and Cicero knows it—and he is also too good a historian to let it stand as if it were true. In De oratore he makes it very clear not only that his portraits of Crassus and Antonius as Hellenized intellectuals are fiction, but that the harmonious gathering at Crassus’ villa represents a smoothing over of what were fairly clearly difficult political relationships, some of the difficulties of which resulted in the violent deaths of several participants in the conversation. In De re publica, it is very clear that moral decline began before 133, as demonstrated by the disgraceful behavior of Rome in the affair of Numantia in 136. Laelius’ speech in Book 3 is very fragmentary, but he evidently offered a theory of just war and just behavior among nations—and showed fairly conclusively that Rome had failed to live up to that standard. Facile moral judgments about history are easy, but they are scarcely credible.
A desire to employ Greek traditions in Roman contexts and for Roman concerns; combining a vision of a longed-for ideal moment of the past with the knowledge of its unreality; a sense of the failure of the archetypal ethical qualities of virtus and fides; the recognition that justice has fled because of human weakness and corruption—most of these characteristics apply to either De oratore or De re publica or both. But the phrases I have used in this case describe not Cicero’s dialogues but a work that was probably written within a year or two of De oratore, Catullus’ great poem on the Wedding of Peleus and Thetis (c. 64). This is not the place to dilate on the similarities between Cicero’s dialogues and Catullus’ poetry, but the choice of tone, the choice of literary models, the gaze directed at both an earlier Rome and a more distant Greece, the sense of the ineluctable ambiguity of our interpretation of the past all provide a set of reflections on progress, decline, and the passage of time, in Catullus and Cicero alike. There are in fact, despite great differences in poetic form and literary intent, considerable similarities among Cicero, Catullus, and even Lucretius, in the manipulation of Greek models both old and recent and the combination of those models with texts or ideas from an earlier Rome and in the desire to elude in some fashion the corruption (political or moral) of the times. I am obviously simplifying a complex set of literary and moral concerns, and the final pages of a book on Cicero’s early dialogues is not the place to attempt a broad interpretation of the literature of the 50s. But there is much that unites these writers. Despite their differences, they are aware of some of the same problems; and while they certainly disagree about solutions, they recognize the same difficulties in deciding how to talk about their circumstances. Their answers about how to act differ radically one from another, but their answers about how to talk about it are in fact the same: to look at Rome, they looked to Greece; by looking at the traditions of Rome, they improved on Greece. De oratore and De re publica, like the work of their contemporaries, are troubled and sometimes difficult works of moral literature; both elements of that last phrase should be given equal weight.
The paragraph of Cicero’s preface to Book 5 of De re publica preserved by Augustine remains to me one of the most moving fragments of ancient literature. One of the images of despair that Cicero uses to describe his, and Rome’s, current situation is that of a faded picture (5.2):
But our own age, having inherited the commonwealth like a wonderful picture that had faded over time, not only has failed to renew its original colors, but hasn’t even taken the trouble to preserve at least its shape and outlines.
What Cicero condemns his contemporaries for not doing, in De oratore and De re publica he does for them: as an artist, he has redrawn the outlines and has restored the picture. And if, as he knows, the colors are brighter than perhaps they originally were, who among us can complain?