Cicero - Anthony Everitt [106]
This theory of the mixed constitution had a great influence on the development of European political thought during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It retained its appeal until the eighteenth century and the emergence of modern democracy. However, it did not fit the circumstances of the last hundred years of the Republic as neatly as Cicero argued it did. For one thing, it took no account of the political significance of the equites, the business class. His ideas also ignored the unpalatable fact that the last attempt to reestablish the mixed constitution, Sulla’s reforms, had been dismantled soon after his death and had, in fact, been guaranteed by another power which receives little attention in On the State, military force.
Cicero was an acute observer of his times and it seems strange that the book does not reflect a more accurate perception of what was really happening. His analysis was cultural rather than political. Like most of his contemporaries, he saw politics fundamentally in personal rather than ideological or structural terms. There had been a decline in moral standards and a corruption of old habits of responsibility in public life. All would be well if only there were a return to traditional values, a rediscovery of the “ideal” statesman and citizen. The constitution itself, properly interpreted, was perfect.
On the State seems to have been an immediate success with the reading public. It contains some of Cicero’s most majestic prose. In the sixth book Scipio recalls a dream in which he met the shade of the long-dead Africanus. A virtuous life, Africanus told him,
“is the highway to heaven, to that assembly of all those who have ended their terrestrial lives and been freed from the flesh. They live in that place over there which you now see” (it was the round of light that blazed brightest of all the fires in the sky), “which you mortals, borrowing a Greek term, call the Milky Circle.” When I looked all around me from that point, everything else appeared extraordinarily beautiful. There were stars invisible from earth, all larger than we have ever conceived. The smallest was the most distant and the one closest to the earth shone with a reflected light. The starry orbs were much larger than the earth. In fact, the earth itself seemed so small that I felt scornful of our empire, which is only a kind of dot.… Beneath the Moon there is nothing that is not mortal and doomed to decay, except for the souls which, by the grace of the gods, have been conferred on humankind. But above the Moon everything is eternal.
AS a literary call to order, the appearance of On the State was timely. But it made little or no impact on the political situation.
The book’s sequel, On Law, also inspired by Plato, was started in 52. Yet Cicero was unable to finish it, if indeed he ever did, until the last year of his life. Only three volumes survive of what may have been intended to be, or were, at least five.
The book is a dialogue, set in the countryside on Cicero’s estate at Arpinum, and the speakers are Quintus, Atticus and the author. The conversation opens with a general debate in which Cicero argues that law is inherent in the workings of the universe. Human law is merely a version, and an imperfect one at that, of the wisdom of the natural order. “Law is the highest reason,” he says, “implanted in nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite. This reason, when firmly fixed and fully developed in the human mind, is Law. And so … Law is intelligence whose natural function it is to command right conduct and forbid wrongdoing.” Later he summarizes: “Virtue is reason completely developed.”
A familiar Ciceronian theme reappears: the moral force of oratory. An important means of fostering virtue is through the art of explanation and persuasion—the “science of distinguishing the true from the false [and] the art of understanding the consequences and opposites of every statement.” The mind “must employ not merely the customary subtle method of debate but also the more copious continuous style, considering,