Cicero - Anthony Everitt [28]
AS a fellow Arpinate, he had mixed feelings about Marius, whom he saw during his last agonized years. He wrote a poetic eulogy of Marius in epic hexameters and admired the superhuman achievements of the general who had destroyed the Cimbri and the Teutones and the tenacity that had raised him to the head of affairs, but he was not at all tempted by his popularis politics. He despised Cinna, whose reign he regarded as a black interlude of criminality. The time spent in the company of senior statesmen and jurists, two of whom, Antonius and Scaevola, had perished in the chaos, gave him a love of tradition he never lost. If only the good old ways could be restored, he thought, all would again be well.
At the same time, although he was on Sulla’s side ideologically, the memory of the Dictator’s vengefulness never left him. In a book published in the 40s he referred, one senses almost with a physical shudder, to “the proscriptions of the rich, the destruction of the townships of Italy, the well-known ‘harvest’ of Sulla’s time.” Cicero detested Roman militarism and came to the view that his old civilian patron, Scaurus, the Leader of the Senate and a forceful defender of the Senate’s authority, was in no way inferior to a general like Marius. “Victories in the field,” he commented, “count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home.”
While in the last resort he could be brave and decisive, Cicero did not have Caesar’s flamboyant coolness under fire. His brief military experience during the War of the Allies had not recommended a soldier’s life to him. So, not for the last time in his career, when confronted by brute force, he retreated from the bloodshed into his books. He feared that he would never realize his ambition to become a lawyer, for, as he recalled, “it appeared that the whole institution of the courts had vanished forever.” AS Plutarch, his biographer, who wrote around the turn of the first century AD, put it: “Seeing that the whole state was splitting up into factions and that the result of this would be the unlimited power of one man, he retired into the life of a scholar and philosopher, going on with his studies and associating with Greek scholars.”
An uncovenanted benefit of the war with Mithridates was that many intellectuals and thinkers fled to Rome. One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case. In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on “invention”—that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was “that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.” This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.
He learned about the doctrines of Stoicism from the philosopher Diodotus, who was a member of his clientela and, until his death in about 60, lived in Cicero’s house. Diodotus seems to have been an indomitable old man; when he became blind in his declining years, he took up geometry and played the lyre. His young employer was impressed by what he learned of a school of thought that saw the universe as an organic whole consisting of two indivisible aspects: an active principle (God) and that which it acts on (matter). Man’s duty was to live an active life in harmony with nature; that was the way to be virtuous, because virtue was the active principle that infused nature. It followed that the wise man was indifferent to fortune and suspicious of emotion. Cicero could not go this far, but he appreciated the modified Stoicism of his day, which sought to reconcile