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CICERO'S ATTITUDE TO CULTURE
date is 150 B.C., had known Duillius, commander in the First Punic War (2.60)
and met people who remembered the war against Pyrrhus before that. He was
talking there to the younger Scipio, who in the De re publica transmits Roman
and family tradition to the younger generation, including the sons-in-law of his
friend Laelius. In the De amicitia, set in the same year (129), Laelius in turn is
entertaining his sons-in-law; while in the De oratore Crassus, initially in the
presence of Laelius' son in-law, the now aged Scaevola the Augur, is represented
as discoursing in 91 to a distinguished gathering, one of whom, Cotta, could be
represented by Cicero as later describing the occasion to himself. 1 In the Prologue
to De finibus 5 (1—8) he recalls his youthful explorations of Athens with
his brother, his cousin, Atticus and another friend: 'wherever we step, we are
treading on history'.
It must be admitted however that Cicero sometimes compromised with his
principles. In politics he was bad at seeing opponents' points of view and
dogmatic in formulating his own. He was capable of soliciting Lucceius to
waive the strict veracities of history when he came to deal with his own consulship
(Fam. 5.1 z). With specious chauvinism he even once asserted that the Latin
language, far from being poor, as was popularly supposed, was richer than the
Greek {Fin. 1.3.10). He was as ready in his speeches as any other advocate, if it
suited his brief, to disparage the law and lawyers, laugh at Stoics, insinuate that
an Epicurean must be a libertine, suggest that you could not trust a Greek or a
Gaul, and call Judaism a barbarous superstition (see p. 252). Only in defending
the Greek poet Archias, where there was little case to answer, did he feel he
could speak out in court for culture. His studies, highly though he valued them,
were in truth a second best to political activity: ' I see nothing else I can do
now.' He suggested that Scipio, the philosophic man of action, had the edge
over Socrates and Plato. Writing after Caesar's murder, when he was once more
at the helm, to his son, then a student of philosophy at Athens, he said, ' one
should know what the philosophers recommend, but live as a man of the world
(ciuiliter) *. z However, as with Seneca, it is the ideals he so eloquently proclaimed,
not the extent to which he lived up to them, that have mattered in the cultural
history of the world.
2. ORATORICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE AS CICERO FOUND IT
Not only higher education but literature in general at Rome was founded on
oratory. For its early history we have to rely on Cicero's account in his Brutus.
Though he shapes this in such a way that it culminates in himself, there is no
evidence, at least in our fragments of previous speeches, 3 to gainsay him.
1
Rambaud (1953) 104-7. * Lactantius, Defals. sap. 3.14.
3
Assembled by H. ( = E.) Malcovati (1955).
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