There was no Roman philosophy as such, at least not before Quintus Sextus created a short-lived sect that joined Stoic ethics to some principles of Pythagoreanism in the early years of the Augustan principate. In fact, the Romans were introduced to philosophy at a time when cynicism and a logical critique of most metaphysical systems were already underway.19 In 155 Carneades, an adherent of Plato’s Academy, gave public lectures in Rome: he would speak in defense of justice on one day and on the next defend injustice (see also Chapter 20). Cato had Carneades and his philosophic embassy hurried out of Rome. The next year two Epicurean teachers were expelled from Rome. Gradually, however, the Roman aristocracy learned philosophy. For the most part, it remained a Greek import, taught by Greeks, often in Athens, until Cicero ‘‘taught philosophy to speak Latin and gave it citizenship’’ (Fin. 3.40). By the early empire, Augustus felt it useful to have a court philosopher. Today, a large part of our philosophical terminology is Latin: ‘‘virtue,’’ ‘‘substance,’’ ‘‘essence,’’ ‘‘principle,’’ ‘‘potential,’’ ‘‘accident,’’ ‘‘final cause,’’ ‘‘efficient cause,’’ etc.
The story of how this happened is complex and, for the most part, takes place after the Republic. But two writers of the Republic, Cicero and Lucretius, played a fundamental role in helping later Romans make Greek philosophy a part of Roman culture and so an expression of Roman identity. Not surprisingly, an important point of entry for philosophical influence was rhetoric: pro and contra arguments were useful for the budding orator (see also Chapter 20). But the late Republic discovered more than practical forensic value in this style of argument. Cicero made it a part of his urgent and practical philosophical meditations. While the Roman encounter with other Greek cultural achievements often troped their serious pretensions in order to play with how they were rhetorically constructed, the Roman encounter with rhetorical philosophy rediscovered practical, political, and moral value in probing the problems of ethics and justice from all sides.
During the dark days of the civil war (46-44) Cicero wrote over thirty books on philosophy. He explored political, ethical, and metaphysical questions while advocating the therapeutic value of philosophical dialog and debate. His final work, On Duties, addressed to his son, turns to Stoic philosophy to understand the practical moral obligations of a Roman, but it is especially typical of the Roman interest in philosophy that Cicero focuses in on the demands of sociopolitical contexts. In the last book of On Duties, he even takes up a question omitted by other philosophers: Can morality conflict with expediency (see also Chapter 20)? His allegiances were eclectic, his perspective skeptical, and his writing rhetorical, not technical. But it was his sense that philosophy could not be divorced from rhetoric, that it needed eloquence to persuade, and that it must address the real problems of Romans that gave his writings their significance. His use of Roman examples, Roman themes and values, and Roman history created a body of work that was identifiably Roman in content as well as in its insistence upon testing theory against the world.
Lucretius (c. 94-55), on the other hand, had a different effect. Nothing was less Roman from the perspective of substance and belief than Epicureanism and nothing was less rhetorical than the dry prose of Epicurus. But Lucretius found in the arguments of Epicurus a practical philosophy that he believed could address man’s unhappiness and provide a social ethics that would act as a corrective to the self-destructive immorality of the Republic. He turned the prose of Epicurus, who distrusted poetry and rhetoric, into an epic diction with the power to influence Virgil. In content, he was a disciple, but in rhetorical and emotional power and in his passionate insistence on the social relevance of his philosophy he was a Roman innovator.
Although Epicureans believed that the gods were indifferent to man, Lucretius figured the creative power of nature as the goddess Venus, mother of Aeneas and founder of the Roman race; and then he pictured Mars, her husband and god of war, reclining in her lap, seduced away from the destructiveness of civil war. But, perhaps more telling, Lucretius figured Epicurus himself as a Roman father and patron, and in this role he offered a Roman challenge to what most of the aristocracy would have thought of as Roman virtues: war, aggression, political activity, and self-promotion (see also Chapter 17). It is, of course, true that Lucretius himself in doing this enacts many of those same aggressive, acquisitive, self-promoting virtues.
Despite Lucretius’ many differences with Cicero, they share the same urgent need for a therapeutic philosophy that can address the problems of Rome. This urgency shapes a rhetoric of conviction and belief which transformed the theoretical emphasis of Greek philosophy just as much as the writers transformed the Latin language and the rhetoric of virtue. For all their differences (and Roman philosophy might be defined by the idiosyncrasy ofits practitioners), their practice of philosophy shares several aspects of that project we call Roman identity: the cultural achievements of Greece are transformed so as to serve both the individual competitive needs of Cicero and Lucretius while aligning their personal success with practical and historical success of Rome. As a result, abstract philosophical argument became a personal and therapeutic tool for an urgent self-transformation.
World History
