Cicero

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Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) was a Roman orator, lawyer, and consul who, in the forced leisure of political defeat, set out to give Latin a philosophy of its own. He was not a system-builder. His method was to take the rival Greek schools — Stoic, Epicurean, Academic, Peripatetic — stage their arguments against one another in dialogue, and let a cultivated reader judge. That habit of weighing rather than asserting was itself a position: Cicero belonged to the skeptical New Academy, which held that certainty was beyond reach and the probable the most a thinker could honestly claim. Much of what later Europe knew of Hellenistic thought it knew first through his Latin.

The Latin philosophy

The philosophical writing was concentrated into a brief, ferocious span. After Julius Caesar’s victory ended the Roman Republic in which Cicero had built his career, and after the death of his daughter Tullia early in 45 BCE, the orator withdrew from a politics that no longer wanted him and poured grief and idleness into prose. Across roughly 46 to 44 BCE he produced an encyclopedia of Greek thought in Roman dress: the lost Hortensius, an exhortation to philosophy that would later turn the young Augustine toward the search for wisdom; the Academica, his defense of the skeptical method; De finibus bonorum et malorum, on the competing accounts of the highest good; the Tusculan Disputations, five books on death, pain, grief, and the sufficiency of virtue for happiness; De natura deorum, De divinatione, and De fato on the gods, prophecy, and necessity; De senectute and De amicitia on old age and friendship; and De officiis, on moral duty, the most influential of them all in the centuries that followed. Each was written fast, in dialogue, and in a Latin that did not yet have words for what Greek philosophy meant.

This is the labor for which the esoteric and the scholarly traditions both prize him: not the discovery of new truths but the construction of a vocabulary. Latin had no native terms for the technical apparatus of Greek epistemology, physics, or ethics, and Cicero forged them — minting or fixing the meanings of words for quality, essence, the moral end, comprehension, the indivisible body, providence, and the appropriate act. A large body of the abstract Latin in which medieval and modern thought was later conducted descends from these dialogues. The transmission ran wider than terminology: through his pages Rome, and through Rome the Latin West, received the doctrines of schools whose own founding texts were already vanishing. For the early Stoa in particular — Zeno, Cleanthes, and the great systematizer Chrysippus, all of whose works are lost — Cicero is among the principal surviving witnesses, even though he was never himself a Stoic. He let the Stoic Balbus speak the school’s theology and the younger Cato voice its ethics, and then set an Academic to answer them.

The skeptical Academy

Cicero’s own allegiance was to the Academy as it stood after Arcesilaus and Carneades had turned Plato’s school from positive doctrine toward suspension of judgment. Where the Stoics held that a true impression could be grasped with certainty — the cognitive impression that guaranteed knowledge — the Academics denied that any impression carried such a mark and argued that the wise course was to withhold full assent. Carneades had softened this into a working criterion: not certainty but the probable, the convincing impression that a reasonable person acts on without claiming to know. Cicero took his version of this position from Philo of Larissa, under whom he had studied at Athens, and made it the engine of his method. The dialogue form was not ornament but epistemology in practice: a man who cannot reach certainty can still arrange the strongest case on every side and follow the most plausible. The Academica, of which two incomplete recensions survive, is his defense of this stance and the chief Latin record of the whole Academic debate; it is also where the Hellenistic quarrel over knowledge and doubt passed into European philosophy.

The gods and the case against divination

For this site the interest narrows to a handful of works. De natura deorum sets the schools’ accounts of the gods side by side without declaring a winner. Three speakers carry the argument: an Epicurean, Velleius, for whom the gods exist but take no interest in the world; the Stoic Balbus, who finds the cosmos itself rational, providential, and divine; and the Academic Cotta, who dismantles both in turn and leaves the question open. Cicero closes by remarking, in his own voice, that the Stoic account seemed to him the more probable — the skeptic’s verdict, not a believer’s.

De divinatione, written soon after as a deliberate companion to it, turns a cold eye on prophecy, dreams, and the reading of omens. It is a dialogue in two books between Cicero and his brother Quintus. In the first book Quintus lays out the full Stoic case for divination — that if the gods exist and care for us and the cosmos is bound by fate, then signs of things to come must be both possible and a gift, and the long record of fulfilled dreams, oracles, entrail-readings and auspices is its proof. The case draws on the Stoic chain of cause and on Posidonius, the school’s last great systematist. In the second book Cicero answers, point by point, with the Academic’s weapons: that correlation is not cause, that successes are remembered and failures forgotten, that no mechanism links a liver’s lobe or a bird’s flight to a future battle, that to grant fate is to make divination useless since nothing one learns could change what is fixed. He dismantles astrology, lots, omens, and prophetic dreams in turn. De divinatione is the single most thorough surviving argument from the ancient world against the readability of the future, and it sits at the center of this site’s account of the divinatory arts, which it attacks more searchingly than any defender ever defended them.

What gives the work its peculiar force is that Cicero himself held the priestly office of augur, charged with taking the auspices for the Roman state — reading the will of the gods in the flight and feeding of birds before public business. He treated the two facts as compatible: the rites bound the community and were worth keeping, whatever one concluded about whether the future could truly be read. The augur’s college served the Republic’s order; the philosopher’s argument served the truth; and a skeptic could honor both without contradiction, since the probable course in politics need not be the proven one in metaphysics. That split between civic religion and private judgment is one of antiquity’s frankest, and it shaped how later ages — pagan, Christian, and esoteric alike — could hold ritual practice and rational doubt in the same hand. The argument is rounded out by De fato, a partly preserved examination of necessity, free will, and the Stoic doctrine of causes, in which Cicero weighs whether everything that happens is determined and whether anything is left to human choice.

The Dream of Scipio

The work that traveled furthest was the Somnium Scipionis, the Dream of Scipio, which closes the sixth and final book of his De re publica — the dialogue on the ideal commonwealth that Cicero, in conscious imitation of Plato’s Republic, wrote between 54 and 51 BCE with the great general Scipio Aemilianus as its principal voice. In the Dream the younger Scipio is carried up in sleep by his adoptive grandfather, the elder Scipio Africanus, beyond the earth to a station among the stars. From there the grandfather shows him the heavens turning in their concentric spheres — the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn beneath the outermost vault — and the earth itself shrunk to a small, faint globe, on which Rome is a speck and human fame a thing too brief and local to be worth craving. The revolving spheres sound together in a great chord, the music of the spheres, a harmony so constant that those who dwell within it no longer hear it; the conception is Pythagorean in descent, the cosmos built as proportioned sound. And the elder Scipio tells the younger that the soul is divine and immortal, that what dies is only the body, and that statesmen who serve the commonwealth in justice have a place waiting for them in the bright band of the Milky Way, returning after death to the heaven from which the soul came. The vision is Platonic in its bones — the soul’s celestial origin, its descent into the body, its ascent and return — dressed in the language of Roman virtue and civic duty.

The Dream’s afterlife outran its parent. When the rest of De re publica was lost through the early Middle Ages — recovered only in 1819, when Cardinal Angelo Mai found the largest surviving portion as a palimpsest in the Vatican Library, the text scraped away and overwritten with Augustine on the Psalms — the Somnium survived on its own. It was carried by the Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis of Macrobius, the Latin scholar who wrote around 400 CE, near the close of antiquity. Macrobius treated Cicero’s dream as a vehicle for a full Neoplatonic cosmology: the procession of soul down through the planetary spheres and its return, the symbolism of number, the orders of virtue, the structure of the cosmos. His commentary became one of the most widely copied and cited books of the medieval West, and through it — alongside Calcidius’s commentary on the Timaeus and the consolations of Boethius — a Platonic picture of an ordered heaven and a soul at home in it reached the Latin Middle Ages. The Dream and its commentary thus became one of the channels through which the cosmology of the heavenly spheres and the celestial destiny of the soul flowed into medieval and Renaissance thought, long before the full Greek Neoplatonists were read again in the original.

A cosmology in a skeptic’s hand

It is one of the quieter ironies of intellectual history that the West’s most durable popular image of an ordered, ensouled cosmos came down through a man who denied that the stars could be read. The Dream of Scipio holds, in compressed Roman form, nearly the whole apparatus that this site traces across so many traditions: the concentric heavenly spheres with the planets ranged between earth and the fixed stars; the Pythagorean conviction that the cosmos is built on number and proportion and sounds a music too vast to be heard; the Platonic teaching that the soul is divine in origin, lodged in the body as if in a prison, and destined to ascend and return; and the moral corollary that the life well lived is rewarded by a place among the stars. Cicero did not invent any of this — he drew the cosmological frame from the Timaeus and from the Pythagorean and Stoic learning that his friend the Stoic Posidonius had gathered — but he set it down in Latin with a clarity and an economy that no Greek original could give a reader who had no Greek. The result was that the doctrine of the soul’s heavenly home reached the medieval and Renaissance West not as the secret of a mystery cult or the gnosis of an initiate but as the plain testimony of a republican consul.

That same double character — the cosmic visionary and the cool prosecutor of omens — is what makes Cicero so useful a figure for understanding the divinatory and astral traditions from the outside. In De divinatione he supplies, through his brother Quintus, the most complete ancient statement of why a believer in a providential and fated cosmos must also believe that the future leaves signs; and then he supplies, in his own voice, the most complete ancient refutation. The two books are not a confession and a recantation but a single skeptical performance: the strongest case for, the strongest case against, and the reader left to judge by what seems probable. The argument was read in this spirit by Augustine, who turned Cicero’s anti-astrological points to Christian use against the casters of nativities, and it remained, through the Latin Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the indispensable arsenal for anyone who wished to dispute the reading of the heavens while still inhabiting a world that took the heavens seriously.

Reception in the esoteric tradition

Scholarship reads Cicero less as an original philosopher than as a translator and transmitter of genius — the man who built the Latin vocabulary in which abstract thought could be conducted at all, coining or fixing terms that still carry the weight. Later readers in the esoteric tradition valued him differently, for the Dream above all: a pagan statesman’s testimony, given outside any mystery cult and in the plainest civic voice, that the heavens were ordered and the soul was at home in them. The Somnium offered the Renaissance Platonists a Latin authority for the music of the spheres and the soul’s celestial ascent that needed no Greek and no initiation, and it sat comfortably beside the prisca theologia — the conviction that one ancient wisdom lay scattered through the pagan sages. Yet the same author had written the ancient world’s most relentless attack on the reading of the stars and the casting of lots, so that Cicero descended to the esoteric West twin-faced: the witness to a divine and ordered cosmos in the Dream, and the great prosecutor of divination and astrology in the second book of De divinatione. He was killed in the proscriptions of 43 BCE, caught near Formiae on the seventh of December and beheaded on the orders of Mark Antony, against whom he had loosed his last and most violent speeches; his head and hands were nailed up on the Rostra in the Forum where he had spoken. The dialogues outlived the politics that produced them.

The texts and the scholarship

The standard scholarly edition of the Academica remains James S. Reid’s M. Tulli Ciceronis Academica, with Latin text and full English commentary (Macmillan, 1885), still the indispensable guide to Cicero’s epistemology. The complete philosophical corpus was first put into English by Charles Duke Yonge in the Bohn’s Classical Library series of the 1850s, whose volumes covered the Academic Questions, De finibus, the Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and On Divination, and which remain freely available (Project Gutenberg: works of Cicero); Yonge’s Tusculan Disputations with The Nature of the Gods and On the Commonwealth is one such volume (Project Gutenberg 14988), and his On Divination is transcribed at (Wikisource: On Divination, Yonge). The facing-page Loeb Classical Library editions are the modern scholarly standard: William Armistead Falconer’s De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione (Loeb, 1923) is in the public domain and is the most accessible critical text and translation of the divination dialogue; John Edward King’s Tusculan Disputations (Loeb, 1927) and Walter Miller’s De officiis (Loeb, 1913) are likewise public domain. Harris Rackham’s Loeb De natura deorum with the Academica (1933) is the standard modern edition of the theological dialogue. The standard modern critical text of the De re publica is the Oxford Classical Text of John G. F. Powell — which prints the De re publica, De legibus, Cato Maior de senectute, and Laelius de amicitia together and rests on a full reconsideration of the manuscript evidence (Oxford, 2006), reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. For the medieval afterlife, the indispensable text is Macrobius’s commentary, translated and introduced by William Harris Stahl as Macrobius: Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (Columbia University Press, 1952), which traces how a Roman skeptic’s dream became a textbook of Neoplatonic cosmology for a thousand years. The fullest single account of Cicero’s philosophy in its own terms is the entry by Raphael Woolf in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Divination · Chaldean Oracles Tradition · Platonism · Stoicism · Fate · Divine Providence · Hellenistic Period · Roman Republic · Prisca Theologia