CUP (2025) h/b 203pp £95 (ISBN 9781009586054)
The Tusculan Disputations have not always found favour with philosophers, some of whom have dismissed Cicero as an amateur hack seriously out of his depth. The work contradicts itself: Epicurus’s ability to suffer pain, for instance, is rejected in book 2 (2.45) but acknowledged later on (5.88). The text is a mishmash of diatribe, dialogue and philosophical treatise, and its conclusion is called ‘feeble’ in this book (p.187). It is, however, a text of massive interest and relevance to us all as these fine essays prove.
The Tusculans ‘aim to persuade a Roman audience of the utility and efficacy of philosophy’ (p.102) in dealing with pain, grief and other mental disturbances. In 45 BC Cicero had plenty to complain about. He had lost his political platform after Caesar’s victory and was grieving for his adored daughter Tullia who had died in February. Cicero wrote philosophical works to make sense of his grief: but also, because 45-44 BC were years when the civil wars produced ‘regular occasions for grief, sorrow and the contemplation of the proper relationship between virtue, happiness and suffering’ (p.3).
Each book of the Tusculans sees an anonymous interlocutor propose a thesis for the author to rebut. Book 1 starts with ‘death is a bad thing’ which is first refuted (‘death is not a bad thing’) and then turned into ‘death is a good thing’. There is little pushback, as Cicero was taking on the ‘habitual convictions of the audience’ (p.18). Warren interrogates Cicero’s use of single letter abbreviations for the anonymous speakers: ‘M’ is presumably Cicero himself (‘Marcus’) but his interlocutor ‘A’ is a cipher. Not for Cicero the sharp dramatic characterisation of (say) a Polus and a Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, and this ‘remarkable dramatic barrenness’ (p.19) is picked up by Rachel Barney as one aspect of the ‘therapeutic’ quality of the text, which reassures us that happiness lies in our own virtuous hands and claims (1.119) that the ‘alleviation of sufferings, fears and lusts’ is ‘the richest fruit of the whole of philosophy’. Cicero, ever the orator, ‘plays every one of [his] cards’ (p.26): bolstering up flagging conviction, calling on the consensus of the wise, reminding us that our heroes (and our inferiors) lived like this, and telling us that (for example) death is not going to hurt whether we survive it or not.
Raphael Woolf homes in on the mysterious ‘A’. Cicero’s practical purpose—to eliminate the fear of death—trumps the quest for epistemic truth, but this has clear drawbacks. Philosophy needs peer-review, and ‘A’ is far too keen to be persuaded. ‘A’ is an interesting study in ‘blue pill’ cognitive dissonance: he would prefer to believe in immortality even if it is not true (1.24), he admits to backsliding when away from the texts, and needs reassurance rather than ‘truth’—and he ends up positively longing for death (1.112) rather like the pupils of the cancelled Hegesias (1.83-4). ‘A’ offers perhaps a cautionary tale on how not to do philosophy (p.50), since we are ‘unlikely genuinely to persuade ourselves’ without a ‘full reckoning of arguments both for and against’ (51).
Nathan Gilbert looks at Cicero’s engagement with the Epicureans in his quest to be the foremost philosophical writer of Rome (p.57) in belated competition with writers such as the poet Lucretius. Cicero dismisses Epicurus as having said nothing more than Socrates (p.57: see Plato Apology 40c), and he mocks their critique of underworld monsters (1.10-11) as unnecessary and insulting. Gilbert calls Cicero’s jibes ‘a critique of Lucretius’ critique of Ennius’ (p.75) but it is possible that Cicero is thinking beyond Lucretius to the myths in Homer (Odyssey 11.576-600), Aristophanes and Ennius.
James Warren looks at Cicero’s stated ‘disdain for pain and death’ (2.43). Epicureans viewed pain as a bad thing, while Stoics regarded it as a ‘dispreferred indifferent’ which we can learn to deal with. Pain for Stoics is always preferable to shame—think of Regulus, for example—and should not prevent the wise/virtuous person from being happy (p.85). Cicero reserves his critical ire for the Epicureans, whose cry-baby avoidance of pain was ‘feeble and womanly’ (2.15). For Cicero’s speaker (‘M’), pain makes courage more courageous (p.92) and we can govern it as master to slave, general to soldier or parent to son. Neither side pointed out that pain is the body’s way of getting our attention and that without it we would be unlikely to survive.
Sharon Weisser looks at Stoic attitudes towards emotions. The Tusculans are medicine for the soul (3.6) which can help us in dealing with those blows of fortune which might knock the virtuous man off course. Weisser ably discusses the difference between the Stoics (who would eradicate emotions) and the Peripatetics (who prefer them to be moderated [p.104]), separating the Stoic view of emotions as unhealthy ‘mental disturbances’ from the Peripatetic view of emotions as both natural and valuable as a means of moral and social progress. Cicero pursues a middle course, urging that emotion is based on the cognitive belief in the goodness or badness of something which we fear (if bad) and desire (if good). This view of emotion allows the wise person to sail through the sea of troubles (p.114). Ever the eclectic, Cicero reassures us that whatever school we adhere to, we can arrive at ‘freedom from emotional disturbances’ which is ‘what philosophy by and large is promising’ (p.119).
Tad Brennan takes this further and points out that Cicero sometimes qualifies ‘pain’ as ‘great pain’. The point is not insignificant: Stoics thought all emotions were categorically bad, but Cicero on occasions distinguishes ‘big’ from ‘less big’ harms, which is closer to Peripatetic perspective and a ‘normal psychology’ (p.132). In consoling people suffering bereavement the need to put things in perspective is crucial—and one which Cicero’s friend Servius Sulpicius even applied to the death of Tullia (Ad Fam. 4.5). Georgia Tsouni then looks at the Peripatetic notion of ‘moderation’ in emotion (metriopatheia) in opposition to the Stoic quest for apatheia. Passions are natural and can be good or bad: some (such as a love of philosophy or love of the state) would even excite a Stoic’s approval (p.155): fear of disgrace makes us moral beings (4.46) and the key thing is to discriminate between them and avoid pathological states like erotic infatuation or financial greed.
Julia Annas looks at the final book, which defends the thesis that virtue is sufficient to make us happy. Cicero argues on Stoic principles in 1-82, but then, in a curious coda, seeks to justify his thesis for all the major philosophical schools in terms of armour-clad tranquillity. To depend on other goods (such as health and fortune) for our happiness makes us vulnerable: only virtue protects us from ‘disturbances of fear, anxiety and unstable desires’ (pp.170-1).
Annas is critical of this final section of the text: ‘after five days of argument, a merely verbal agreement is a feeble conclusion for the final book to end with’ (p.187). Cicero’s irenic climb-down—that these conflicting schools may travel by different routes but reach the same destination—is, Annas says, flawed as they would argue like rats in a sack if they could not agree on the ‘final end’: what is the good life for one is not the good life for others. Cicero’s stance only works if one overplays the therapeutic side of the enterprise and ignores the truth—rather like ‘A’ did at 1.24. Cicero’s final sentence is a personal cri de coeur, unsure of whether he has helped anybody else but sure that ‘in my most bitter pains (acerbissimis doloribus) and the different problems which have attacked me from all directions (variisque et undique circumfusis molestiis) no other consolation could have been found’. This is not the author admitting defeat, but it is at least a suitably modest claim for his efforts and an acceptance that the pains of life and death are not easily overcome—even by a Cicero.
John Godwin