Epilogue

When in the Tusculan Disputations Cicero had listed gravitas, constantia, magnitudo animi first among the Roman ancestral virtues, Gildenhard saw this as in reality a redefinition - of what it was to be Roman under tyranny. Gravitas and constantia articulated a philosophy of self-sufficiency (Gildenhard 2007: 125), magnitudo animi ‘‘an ethos of lofty indifference’’ 2 to life under Caesar: in short, a retreat into the private sphere which nonetheless signaled its active republican inheritance. The evidence amassed in this chapter demonstrates on the contrary that over two decades (or more, in the case ofgravitas and constantia) Cicero consistently represented these attributes as the qualities typically exhibited by great political actors in their defense of the common good against attempts to subvert it. Magnitudo animi entered his vocabulary only when he was forced to think about Cato and what gave him his particular strength and authority as a public figure. But once it did, he was glad to appropriate it and associate it with others of the ancestral virtues he liked to celebrate in those devoted in their public life to the cause of the res publica: fides, integritas, auctoritas, for example, as well as gravitas and constantia. And when he turned to writing philosophy in 46-44 bc, he found it natural to employ gravitas and constantia in Stoicizing vein to characterize philosophy itself and philosophical consistency. The scope and moral foundations of magnitudo animi, always understood in Stoic terms, were to be thoroughly explored in De officiis.

In 45 BC Cicero delivered a speech before Julius Caesar on behalf of Deiotarus, whom Pompey had made king of Galatia, and who was now charged with plotting to assassinate the dictator. He praises Deiotarus’s magnitudo animi, gravitas, and con-stantia, after rehearsing all the many motions passed in the senate in gratitude for his services rendered to Roman generals campaigning in the east. With gross rhetorical exaggeration (which he must have known would be perfectly apparent to Caesar) Cicero claims that all the philosophers make these virtues the only true good, sufficient for the life of happiness - but Deiotarus, he adds at once, attributes all his tranquillity and peace of mind to Caesar’s clementia (Deiot. 37-8).23 The message is clear. The philosophers would go so far as to make such a person a Stoic sage in his moral perfection. But Deiotarus knows that he owes a quiet old age to Caesar. His devotion to the res publica deserves no less. His virtues mark Deiotarus as a great public servant, an honorary Roman.

The associations of the vocabulary are just the same as they were under the Republic. By exploiting them, Cicero within a few short sentences achieves the ingenious feat of coded reiteration of republican ideals, as forcefully expressed as ever, coupled with calculated flattery of the dictator made all the more effective by a mediating play on philosophical ideas that would have been common ground between the two of them. In Cicero republican virtues, as this chapter will have made plain, always live within argument, forensic or philosophical as the case may be.