Bloomsbury (2023) p/b 175pp £19.99 (ISBN 9781350376687)
B. makes no bones about the purpose of this book: it is to use Cicero’s thoughts about the relationship between politics and Stoic philosophy to save modern liberal democracy from the rise of far right authoritarian populism, which B. sees exemplified in Rome by Julius Caesar and which brought the Roman Republic to its knees.
As the reviews on the back of the book rightly say, this is a lively and engaging piece of work. But readers must be alerted to two problems. First, B. thinks that Cicero is a philosopher. He is not. He is a lawyer, and his aim is to make a case, at which he is a master. He asserts his views, which are drawn mainly from the Greek Stoic philosopher Panaetius, without subjecting them to critical examination.
Second, Cicero is presented both as a man of his times who e.g. saw Julius Caesar as a tyrant and hated everything he stood for, but also as a contemporary, with reviews remarkably similar to B.’s. For example, B. suggests that Cicero would be shocked ‘by the grotesque levels of domestic and global inequality in the modern world’. What would have shocked Cicero, of course, who lived perfectly happily in a slave society, would be the absence of slaves, today’s extraordinarily high standards of living, women take leading roles in politics, and so on. B. absurdly likens Cicero, a wealthy member of the Roman elite, to a modern refugee or immigrant because he was a novus homo (i.e. the first in his family as consul and consequently the subject of a degree of envy and suspicion about whether he was up to the job). But how could any family become consular without having one of its members appointed consul for the first time? Refugees and immigrants should be so lucky!
B. ranges widely over Cicero’s work, beginning with de officiis Book 1 (different chapters feature different works), in which Cicero presents a view of justice as a communal bond, built on reciprocity and our duty to others rather than any ‘rights’, and forged on man’s innate desire to live in communities. Here B. makes a contrast between liberalism, or rather neo-liberalism, and republicanism: the former opens the floodgates to selfishness and greed in no one’s interests except oneself’s, because market forces rule the world (does that follow?); but republicanism clings to the central notion of the common good, a society working in everyone’s interests. B. puts the republic (res publica, ‘the people’s property, business’), as a place of freedom and equal partnership in justice, in contrast with liberal democracy’s ‘me-first’ free for all (is that necessarily the case?). But could ‘all [Roman] citizens aspire to become statesmen’? Not without money equal to that of the top 2% of society, they couldn’t, unlike today.
B. suggests that the Romans saw the importance of freedom early on in their history when they threw out the last of the kings. The point about the monarch was that he controlled ‘subjects’, with no say about how they were ruled. The republic, on the other hand, encouraged political activity on the part of the citizens, as became evident when the plebeian revolt of 494 BC resulted in a plebeian assembly whose decisions eventually applied to all Romans. But as the Roman Republic collapsed in the 1st century BC, Caesarism brought with it a monarchic-style arbitrary domination over the state, in which legal safety mechanisms such as civis Romanus sum no longer had any real traction. As Cicero said, ‘What is a state other than an equal partnership in justice?’
B. follows this up with a chapter on ancient theories of friendship, that true friends are linked by trust in their joint commitment to virtue, which makes friends with a tyrant an impossibility. This does not add a great deal to the general argument, except to assert that commitment to the republic must come before any commitment to friends. B. ends this section ends with the accurate observation that, since Cicero placed the highest value on the truth, friendships forged via social platforms are unlikely to prove productive in a world of ‘virtual reality’ (what a corruption of the word ‘virtue’).
B. then turns his attention to what Cicero had to say about old age which, for all its physical problems, he saw as the best part of life because of the wisdom which one should have accrued and which one had a duty to pass on to the young. But only by leading a virtuous (and not a virtual) life in one’s youth could one hope in old age to fulfil one’s responsibilities to the young. Cicero’s many dialogues composed in his final years heroically fulfilled that responsibility.
B. ends the book by reinforcing his view of the importance of Cicero for the modern world, especially in the light of our duties as citizens in the face of the rise of the populist far right and widespread political corruption and expresses the hope that his book will find its way into the hands of the young in school. That, he feels, should open their eyes to Cicero’s philosophy and his ‘reputation as a role model for anyone who champions democracy over despotism’ in the fight against the dangers that face us.
B. writes with great vigour, is amusing about his inability to master Latin (it shows) and has indeed produced a book filled with challenging ideas and observations that, labelled with a warning note (did Cicero really ‘champion democracy’?), could be profitably placed in every student’s hands, as de officiis was from the renaissance onwards (700 copies survive from that period). Understanding the nature and purpose of an author’s aims—whether Cicero’s or B.’s, political or otherwise—makes an admirable exercise for those glued to the virtue-free digital world. Sixth-formers could stage some splendid debates about the ancient and modern world on the back of B.’s thesis.
Peter Jones