Cicero - Anthony Everitt [149]
The whole life of the philosopher, Plato said, is a preparation for death. For what else do we do when we remove the soul from pleasure—that is to say, from the body, from private property (the body’s agent and servant), from public affairs and from every kind of private business: what, I repeat, do we do except call the soul into its own presence and cancel its allegiance to the body? And is separating the soul from the body anything else than learning how to die? So let us, believe me, study to dissociate ourselves from our bodies—that is, to acclimatize ourselves to the idea of death. While we are still alive, this will be an imitation of heavenly life: once we are free from our chains here, our souls will run their race less slowly. For those who have always been shackled to the flesh make slower progress even when they are released. It is as if they have spent many years in manacles. Once we have arrived at the other place, and only then, shall we live. For this life is truly death and I could, if I would, weep for it.
The discipline of the gladiator and the self-sacrifice of the Indian widow who commits suttee and joins her husband on the funeral pyre demonstrate that virtue can transcend pain. In this conclusion Cicero endorses Stoicism in a way that he felt unable to do in On Supreme Good and Evil, written a few months earlier, for he could now see, as the full intensity of his mourning subsided, how he had dragged himself from the brink of breakdown through firmness of mind.
The Nature of the Gods (De deorum natura), Foretelling the Future (De divinatione) and Destiny (De fato) address religious and theological themes. Collectively, they ridicule the anthropomorphic conception of God, or the gods, and propose that Epicurus, who speculated that the gods lived happily but impotently and had no effect on human affairs, was a crypto-atheist. Cicero tends to a Stoic pantheism (which gives him the opportunity to celebrate the physical universe in passages of great poetic grandeur). He criticizes superstition—dreams, portents, astrology and the like—and is particularly incensed by the Stoics’ commitment to the art, or pseudoscience, of divination, by which investigation into the future can make it possible to avoid unpleasant events. Either the future is subject to chance—in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other—or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it. AS he had been appointed an Augur in 53, it is not surprising to find that Cicero recognizes, even if he does not believe in, the art of augury but thinks it should be maintained for reasons of public expediency rather than accuracy. While external factors may influence our actions, they cannot control them, for that would be to negate free will. To say “what will be, will be” is not to imply that the future is predetermined.
Cicero’s last major work is Duties (De officiis); written in autumn 44, it takes the form of a letter to Marcus, who was making heavy weather of his philosophical studies in Athens at this time. Complementing the theoretical discussions in On Supreme Good and Evil, it is based on the work of a Stoic philosopher, Panaetius, who was a member of the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, Cicero’s great hero from the second century (and the protagonist of his dialogue On the State). It has a practical cast and reflects the experience of the author’s own lifetime. Composed at a time when Cicero was returning to public life, it condemns citizens who abstain from political activity.
The work opens with a discussion of the cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, fortitude and temperance—and goes on to set out the specific duties that follow from adherence to them. Cicero’s central concern is the contradiction between virtue and the inevitable