When the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero penned his immortal Second Philippic attacking the lover of life, Mark Antony, he could not have known that he would set the tenor for centuries to come for all lovers of liberty in their fight against tyranny. Nor could he have known that his depiction of Mark Antony and the significance of his struggle against him would become canonical. Most men write their present. A few greats, such as Churchill, convincingly write their own past. Cicero wrote his own future.
Not that any of this was obvious to him at the time. Rome in 44 B.C. was a cesspit. The dictator for life had just been assassinated. A couple of years prior, the stalwart and stubborn defender of the republic Cato had committed suicide in gutsy fashion, disembowelling himself with his own hands. Respectable friends and enemies alike had expired—or been expired. Thugs and youths remained. The senate—that esteemed symbol of republican Rome—was a craven nullity. The few distinguished individuals who had not met an untimely death, such as Cicero’s good friend Atticus, had wisely chosen to stay out of politics. Those seeking the limelight learned to bypass the traditional offices. Corruption and danger were the only rewards left for those competing in the cursus honorum. To say that the late Roman republic was polarized would miss the mark, for polarization implies a clear political spectrum to begin with. It was not just politics that was upended, but even the ability to interpret politics. Few solutions could be found. Fewer were the reasons for hope.
It was in these perilous times that the elder statesman, in great haste, enshrined a lifetime’s worth of practical ethics in what would justly become one of the most celebrated philosophical texts in the Western tradition: De Officiis (On Duties).
The very title On Duties should provoke reflection. We live in a world of ever-expanding rights, not duties. From legal rights to political rights to women’s rights and human rights and so forth, we are imbued with the spirit of what we are owed. This is perhaps as it should be, at least for those who believe they are endowed by their Creator with pre-political rights. However, sundry problems attend. Who or what specifically is responsible for guaranteeing our rights? Society is an unsatisfactory answer, as society today is little more than a spontaneous order of individuals, complicating the attribution of responsibility. As any competent employer knows, if everyone in the organization is responsible, then no one is. In practice then responsibility falls on the state as the entity with the legitimate monopoly over the use of violence to protect rights. This is acceptable enough to account for the rights that the state guarantees to its own citizenry. But what happens when the state violates the rights of its own citizenry? Is state A supposed to protect the human rights being violated within state B?
Rights-talk also appeals to our preference for legal sanctions in cases of wrongdoing. Other than within a small number of professions, we cannot punish those who fail to do their duties, whereas violators of rights are always within reach of the long arm of the law. And because we pride ourselves on tolerating diverse beliefs and lifestyles, appeals to conscience and public shaming are neither as acceptable nor as effective at maintaining a certain order of things. We thus have few tools left beyond recourse to legal sanctions. Not that any of this is generally seen as a vice. In fact, rights-talk aligns well with our support for individual liberty. Everyone is free to speak and do as they will, provided their words and actions do not cause harm to others, which is why there is little that can be done to restrict such liberty apart from framing undesirable forms of it as forms of harm.
All of this has had the perverse effect of reconceptualizing duties as a restriction of personal liberty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the psychologically impairing effect of rights-talk. We do not need to fulfill anything in order to be afforded our rights. In fact, we need not do anything at all to enjoy our rights. We are the passive recipients of rights. When our rights are infringed, then we become victims, thereby continuing to play the passive role. It is no wonder that such a view of human nature has given birth to so many social sciences that study human behaviour. What these sciences and an overweening obsession with rights-talk share in common is the conviction that man does not act. He is rather a blank slate, on which biology and social context are inscribed, and he can only be nudged in the proper direction by sound social structures. But if we do not know what the common good is, then how are we to know what the ‘proper direction’ is?
A common good presupposes the idea of the good for man as such, a good that man can freely choose through his acts. But if man merely responds to external stimuli and nudging—in other words, if he is not a being that acts—then why does he need freedom? This negative ‘freedom’ becomes an end in and of itself, both oxymoronic and unsatisfying. The original theorists of this negative liberty were still enlightened enough with the spirit of the ancients to assume that man would aspire to excellence and virtue, but we today have occluded our inheritance. We are thus permitted to ask again if liberty entails the power to do anything or only what one should want to do.
By directing us towards what one should want to do, duties restore human agency. They begin with the fundamentally uplifting assertion that man can act. As such, they are deeply empowering. Ironically, those who sense their lives are overwhelmed by the daily grind may rediscover their own agency and freedom within duties. Duties and virtues provide order within both the polity and the individual human soul. They breathe life into a strong constitution, just as the soul breathes life into the body. They are essential in that they are embedded in man’s very nature. In recovering the language of duties and virtues, we might recover our human nature. In recovering our human nature, we may recover a superior science of human action. In recovering a superior science of human action, we will nourish a more reasonable politics. Cicero points the way.
Virtues are both the starting and the end point, for they are the perfection of man’s nature. How, then, does Cicero regard man’s nature? Since Darwin it has been fashionable to enumerate the manifold ways in which man is merely a more advanced chimpanzee. Even if old Tully had known our sophisticated science, he would not have let it dull his common sense. The most unsophisticated human mind can discern a clear difference between man and beast. Beasts are incapable of scaling the sublime heights or plumbing the depraved depths. Only we are so awesome and so awful. Where Cicero grants that we, like the animals, wish to preserve life, avoid harm, and procreate, he locates the essential difference in our capacity for reason. Our nature, mediated by reason, points naturally to the virtues, to those habits that bring man to his proper flourishing. Four qualities stand out: Humans by nature seek to know, to congregate with one another, to be pre-eminent amongst others, and to maintain order. Wisdom, justice, greatness of spirit, and seemliness (decorum). Let us examine them in turn.
Concerned more with practical ethics, Cicero dispenses rather hastily with wisdom (he would reserve an entire separate book for the study of good and bad ends). For while the Roman statesman could occasionally condone an aloof removal from politics for the pure contemplation indispensable to the pursuit of wisdom, he generally felt the same awkwardness as his compatriots who had been forced out of public life to take up the contemplative life. His writings would be his greatest political act.
The second virtue, justice, includes justice proper as well as liberality. Of all of the virtues, justice is perhaps the only one that continues to resonate as loudly today as in Cicero’s day. One of its modern variants, accompanied by the prefix ‘social,’ would hardly have met with Cicero’s approval, though it also would have scarcely surprised him: familiar with the Gracchi, Catiline, Clodius, Caesar, and others, Cicero could easily recognize elites pretending to represent various groups with claims on the republic.
True justice for Cicero means not harming others unless provoked, preventing injustices from taking place, respecting public and private goods, and keeping faith. A man is neither lion nor fox, but if he stoops to the level of a beast, then better the lion than the fox: the lion is honest in his brutality, whereas man as fox uses his own most divine gift—his reason—for the purpose of deceiving. The economically privileged in society are additionally obliged, within reason, to be liberal with their wealth. It is worth noting, however, that such generosity is an obligation expected to be fulfilled by the privileged themselves, not by the state on behalf of the privileged. In modern parlance, Cicero would prefer voluntary transfers of wealth to extortionate tax schemes. Excessive state redistribution of wealth also tends to fall short of Cicero’s warnings about liberality, namely that one’s generosity neither harm the recipients nor outstrip one’s capabilities: rapacity follows Caesar’s generosity—and indeed, enables it in the first place.
So far, so good. Human equality demands justice and liberality. But as self-evident as our equality is, no less self-evident is our inequality. Our nature thus produces two contradictory tendencies. Inequality’s virtue is greatness of spirit. Courage is a component but not the whole, for the whole covers the various ways in which men seek always to be the best and surpass all others. This means rising above what is most common in man. Our need to survive and fulfill basic needs is common, as is the acquisition of wealth, which is a means of securing survival. Closely connected are the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
None of these, however, are worthwhile goals for the magnanimous man. He disdains such ends and the passions that provoke them, for they aim merely at sustaining man at his lowest, as a lifeform. Such disdain thus sometimes extends to life itself, especially in the face of danger, and hence greatness of spirit includes courage. It is commonly seen in founders of countries and those who stand alone against tyranny. It is seen with more difficulty in pacific and democratic centuries, for such centuries prize equality and the preservation of life. Because it is difficult to see, our science ignores it, unable to imagine that man could lust for anything more than mediocrity; for what else is equality than rank mediocrity? What else is socialism than the odious mob’s tepid celebration of enough bread and circuses to keep them satisfied and stupefied?
Nietzsche saw well the problem of equality. But his antidote was as poisonous as the disease. He was eloquent in his enthusiasm, but we cannot always expect that future critics of equality will be equally well-educated or erudite. We mustn’t ignore man’s drive to greatness. It is grounded in our nature and therefore exists to varying degrees in all people. Its perfection can produce the violence of an Achilles or a Caesar. The latter exemplified the dangers of magnanimity unbound. For this reason, Cicero is at pains to stress that true greatness of spirit involves performing deeds that are great but also helpful to the community.
The ambitious risk not only harming the community but also consequently the very audience that is intended to do them honour. Glory is meaningless without others to recognize it, and one has only so much control over how one is perceived. Thus, the fatal flaw of Caesar, who had to conflate the pursuit of power with the pursuit of glory. But power has its limits, and true glory is bestowed upon those who are above seeking it. Cato preferred to take his own life than live under a tyrant. When Cicero wrote a eulogy for the republican, Caesar, to his credit, chose to respond in print as well. Two immortal orators at odds over the legacy of Cato. But Caesar’s treatment of stalwart Cato was so vitriolic that it served only to underscore the gulf separating coerced from true glory. The most powerful man in Rome was powerless against the shade of republicanism. In his manic drive to superiority, the dictator for life was both obstinate and vacillating, ignorant of his place in the firmament.
If the will to inequality that underlies greatness of spirit is innate to man, how are we to deal with it? The answer lies in Cicero’s fourth virtue, decorum. A panoply of good manners and niceties make up decorum, including the crucial virtue of moderation, but the core of decorum is order. Even virtue has need of limits. Excess concern for wisdom tears one away from the concerns of his fellow man. Plato’s Republic demonstrates the dangers of seeking perfection in justice. Greatness of spirit all too easily turns into violent savagery if it is not reined in. The virtues, just like the passions, must be set in order. Which means that one must know in what respects one is liable to succumb to extremes, so that one knows what is most in need of moderation. In other words, decorum demands that one know himself—his universal nature as a human being as well as his particular nature as a particular individual. The injunction of the oracle at Delphi is as clear as it is difficult.
Alas, I transmit but do not innovate. What I have conveyed above is nothing new. But today we are lost in novelty and discover myriad ways to convince ourselves that this time it is not all vanity and vexation of spirit. We give a passing glance at the fleeting and call it knowledge. And yet true knowledge is of those things that are eternal.
Cicero had the gift of expressing the eternal in language both clear and beautiful. He directs our gaze upwards to see the eternal in all of its purity. The technological and economic advances in the world will do nothing to change politics and the nature of man, for these are unchanging. And hence that which is eternal bears repeating over and over again.
