TSDK No. 63. Hello in There
From Beach Bodies, a work in progress
Cicero gets it in the neck
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC- 43BC) was a man of many talents: lawyer, orator, statesman, philosopher. Timing, however, was not his strong suit, as it was his misfortune to be born just as the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic was entering its terminal stage. Elected consul in 63BC, he defended those ancient principles with great ruthlessness; when he uncovered the “Catiline conspiracy” to install a dictatorship, he demanded that the plotters be executed. The republic was saved, but his uncompromising attitude made him many enemies, including Julius Caesar, who had his own dictatorial aspirations.
By 57BC, Cicero’s enemies had the upper hand, and he fled Rome. His exile lasted only a year and half, but by the time he returned, the empire was already set on a path that would lead to the end of the Republic. Cicero backed the losing side in the civil war that raged between 49 and 45BC, but it was not the victor, Caesar, who had him killed. Rather it was his second-in-command, Mark Antony, who came to power as part of the ruling triumvirate following Caesar’s assassination in the senate. In a series of 14 speeches named the Philippics Cicero had denounced Antony as variously a deserter, a drunk, a catamite and a thief, while also comparing him to Helen of Troy: “As Helen was to the Trojans, so has that man been to this republic—the cause of war, the cause of mischief, the cause of ruin.”
There was no way back from that, and in 43BC, Cicero fled from his villa on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, running down to the beach in the hope that he might find a ship on which he could sail far away. But there were no ships, so he took to the road, where he ran into the assassins who had been sent to kill him. Aware that his time was over he said to his killer, a centurion named Herennius: “I go no further: approach, veteran soldier, and, if you can at least do so much properly, sever this neck.” Herennius obliged and, following orders from Antony, also cut off his hands. Cicero’s head and hands were then carried back to Rome and put on display in the senate, pour encourager les autres.
But if Cicero failed at politics, he was highly successful as a philosopher, and is still widely read more than two millennia after his death. He began young, with a treatise on rhetoric in his early 20s, but most of the texts on which his reputation rests were produced after exile, when he was in his 50s and 60s. Cicero popularized Greek philosophy for Roman audiences: in On the Republic, he draws on Plato’s Republic to explore the ideal government; in the sequel, On the Laws, he probes questions of law and justice. In On the Ends of Good and Evil, Cicero asks “what is good?” and explores the answer through the lenses of Epicureanism and Stoicism. In The Tusculan Disputations, written after the death of his only daughter in childbirth, Cicero draws upon Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Zeno Pythagoras and others to help him grapple with pain, death and grief.
Cicero’s reputation survived the cultural revolution that followed the eventual triumph of Christianity throughout the empire, and afterwards, throughout Europe. Five hundred years after his death, St Augustine declared the Roman philosopher a “virtuous pagan”. Consequently, when Dante wrote his Inferno 900 years later, he placed Cicero in the first circle of hell, where he was spared the worst torments; far better to spend eternity in a castle with Aristotle than to wander forever through a burning desert like a blasphemer, or wallow forever in a river of shit, like a flatterer.
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As the recipient of a state education in the UK in the 1980s and 90s, I knew little of this. Although I had spent two years studying Latin in high school, we didn’t do “real” books, and while Cicero’s was a name I was familiar with, it wasn’t until I watched the HBO series Rome decades later that I learned anything about his life. The plot however focused on Cicero’s conflicts with Caesar and Antony and didn’t mention his writings; those I wouldn’t read until I was in my mid-40s, when I picked up On Divination, written the year before his death.
On Divination came to my attention because I had become interested in the many futile ways by which human beings have, throughout history, attempted to know the future. My belief was that while our contemporary methods of making predictions were more sophisticated than astrology (interpreting the movements of the heavens) haruspicy (interpreting the entrails of sacrificial animals), ornithomancy (interpreting the flight paths of birds), or oneiromancy (interpreting dreams), they were nevertheless fueled by the same fundamental fears and terrors. Our much vaunted mathematical models, I suspected, might often be little more than a sophisticated expression of numerology. I was willing to grant that where there were fewer variables then it might be possible to come up with statistical models that did tell us something about the world; but the greater the number of variables, then the closer we got to priests staring at sheep’s entrails as far as I was concerned.
Cicero, it turned out, was also a skeptic, albeit more thoroughgoing than me. Had I lived in ancient times, in a world saturated with gods and spirits, then I suspect I would have adopted a position similar to the one I held on statistical modeling; that while there was a lot of fakery and self-deception, it couldn’t all be false. That was the argument advanced by Cicero’s brother, Quintus, who was Cicero’s sparring partner in On Divination, which is written in dialogue form. Cicero, however, rejected the possibility of divination outright and systematically eviscerated all his brother’s arguments. His victory is total, as is to be expected when you’re the one holding the pen. Cicero’s skepticism seemed not only ahead of its time, but ahead of our time. Whereas those who imagine themselves to be rationalists will always have their own secret store of shibboleths and unexamined assumptions, Cicero was willing to follow his logic wherever it led him; psychological comfort was for the hoi polloi.
Having read On Divination, I realized that I had uncovered a significant gap in my knowledge of literature, which was that I had barely read anything written by an ancient Roman. On Divination was one of Cicero’s more niche texts, and so to balance things out, I felt that I should read a major work. I had to choose carefully, of course, as death was approaching and I did not have the luxury of time to mount a full study of his writings. Political science wasn’t my thing, so the books on law and politics were out; but I was interested in his discourses on the good life. There was a lot less background noise in the ancient world, and its great writers, with their amoral gods and general lack of metaphysical consolation, wrote about the capriciousness of fate with a directness that is lost to us. That said, I knew that the grief described in the Tusculan Disputations was beyond my own experience, and for whatever reason, I just wasn’t very interested in what Cicero had to say about friendship. On Old Age was a different matter, however: my whitening beard provided me each day with evidence of the dwindling store of years left to me. Given the acceleration of time as you age, I understood that I would be 60 not long after I turned 50. Blink twice and I’d be 70, blink again and I’d be 80 — if I even made it that far, of course. I should read On Old Age now, while I still had time to prepare.
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Cicero before he got old
Cicero was 62 when he wrote On Old Age, but clearly did not consider that sufficiently ancient to speak with authority on the subject. Instead, he put his argument in the mouth of Cato the Elder, a fellow a statesman-writer-philosopher who had lived to the ripe old age of 84 a century earlier. It was Cato who uttered the famous words Carthago delenda est whenever he spoke in the senate, regardless of the actual topic under discussion. Among his works were a history of Rome, an encyclopedia, and a book on farming in which he extolled the virtues of manuring. Unlike Cicero, he was destined to die a happy death, fulfilled both in politics and in life. The Third Punic War was just getting started as he took the great leap into oblivion; Carthage would be destroyed after all.
On Old Age was quite brief, so I was able to rattle through it quickly. Like On Divination, it had a dialogic structure, but was less contentious. In the text two much younger men, Scipio and Laelius, pay a visit to Cato and marvel at how lightly he carries himself, and ask him to explain “by what methods we may most easily acquire the strength to support the burden of advancing age.”
The core of it, Cato explains, is to start young:
You may be sure, my dear Scipio and Laelius, that the arms best adapted to old age are culture and the active exercise of the virtues. For if they have been maintained at every period—if one has lived much as well as long—the harvest they produce is wonderful, not only because they never fail us even in our last days (though that in itself is supremely important), but also because the consciousness of a well-spent life and the recollection of many virtuous actions are exceedingly delightful.
Next, Cato identifies the four main reasons that old age is considered unhappy:
First, that it withdraws us from active employments; second, that it enfeebles the body; third, that it deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures; fourth, that it is the next step to death.
He then proceeds to rebut these arguments one by one. First, it is essential to accept each stage of life on its own terms:
The course of life is fixed, and nature admits of its being run but in one way, and only once; and to each part of our life there is something specially seasonable; so that the feebleness of children, as well as the high spirit of youth, the soberness of maturer years, and the ripe wisdom of old age—all have a certain natural advantage which should be secured in its proper season.
According to Cato, it is as absurd for an old man to wish himself younger as it is for a young man to wish himself a baby. Since each age has its own unique pleasures, you should lean into those. Take war, for instance: although the ravages of time make it impossible for you to participate directly in the fighting and killing, you can still derive satisfaction by calling for the total devastation of your enemies from a position of influence:
….I enjoin upon the Senate what is to be done, and how. Carthage has long been harbouring evil designs, and I accordingly proclaim war against her in good time. I shall never cease to entertain fears about her till I hear of her having been levelled with the ground.
Cato is undoubtedly correct here. In my own lifetime there has been no end of war, all done at the behest of old men, as well as some old women, not to mention men and women who were only middle-aged. Clearly, the pleasure of laying waste to foreign lands is a real thing. Indeed, so addictive are these vicarious thrills that even when the wars go terribly wrong, as they usually do, the old men are never dissuaded from calling for fresh wars in new places. Alas, this insight was not very helpful to me as I had not pursued a career that would ever put me in a position where I could successfully engineer the devastation of an enemy nation.
Fortunately, Cato’s next bit of advice for enjoying old age was somewhat more relatable:
Old men retain their intellects well enough, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed. Nor is that the case only with men of high position and great office: it applies equally to private life and peaceful pursuits. Sophocles composed tragedies to extreme old age…
This, too, seemed indisputable. For instance, while pension age rock stars like The Rolling Stones had at one time seemed fairly ridiculous to me, I now regarded them with something close to awe. How was it possible that Mick Jagger, well into his 70s (and now 80), could prance and strut and yell on stage for two hours? Yes, he had access to every rejuvenation treatment going, but even so it was a remarkable spectacle. This was a new type of old age, something that had never before been seen. I felt the same way about Clint Eastwood. The films he was making in his 80s might not have been good, but the fact that he was churning one out every year was itself an astonishing achievement. By staying engaged with their work well past retirement age, Jagger, Eastwood and many others like them were able to live with the stamina and energy of men many decades younger.
But while Cato and I were in agreement on the importance of staying active, I considered his argument that the vigor of youth was not to be missed sheer sophistry:
Nor, again, do I now miss the bodily strength of a young man… any more than as a young man I missed the strength of a bull or an elephant. You should use what you have, and whatever you may chance to be doing, do it with all your might.
Yes, you should make the most of whatever strength remained, but deteriorating eyesight, brittle bones, memory loss and increased fragility were not trivial. Would it be irrational to miss music if you lost your sense of hearing? Of course not. Cato was more interesting when it came to sexual appetite:
No more deadly curse than sensual pleasure has been inflicted on mankind by nature, to gratify which our wanton appetites are roused beyond all prudence or restraint. It is a fruitful source of treasons, revolutions, secret communications with the enemy. In fact, there is no crime, no evil deed, to which the appetite for sensual pleasures does not impel us. Fornications and adulteries, and every abomination of that kind, are brought about by the enticements of pleasure and by them alone.
I had heard variants of this argument before. I remembered an interview with Leonard Cohen in which he had described the disappearance of his libido as “a relief”. And then there was my neighbor Crazy Dave, who had reassured me “that stuff goes away” when explaining to me why he didn’t mind being exiled to the couch on account of his loud snoring. According to Cato, this liberation from a harmful impulse freed you to focus on more refined pleasures:
Why, what blessings are these—that the soul, having served its time, so to speak, in the campaigns of desire and ambition, rivalry and hatred, and all the passions, should live in its own thoughts, and, as the expression goes, should dwell apart! Indeed, if it has in store any of what I may call the food of study and philosophy, nothing can be pleasanter than an old age of leisure.
For instance, you could read Xenophon, take up farming and spread a lot of manure, or even plant vines and make wine. With the right attitude, the satisfaction of a life well-lived, and the correct interests, old age could be awesome.
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Kris and Joanie lay out the counter argument
At the moment of reading, the argument in On Old Age was, for the most part, persuasive. But as I reflected upon the text afterwards, I noticed some significant limitations.
For instance, I had a hard time imagining that the rosy picture of old age that Cicero painted through his portrait of Cato was applicable to (say) slaves, women or peasant farmers 2000 years ago. Essentially, Cicero was writing for an audience of wealthy Roman aristocrats. On the other hand, living standards had risen to such an extent over the past two millennia that many of the conditions his argument was now relevant to many more people than when he had written it. Yet even then I felt that he was missing something…
I remembered Mr. Pike, the old widower on my street that I used to see sitting on benches around the town, waiting for the hours to pass so he could go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Like Cato, he had fought in war, but he was not given the satisfaction of directing them in old age. I thought of my grandmother, a dairy worker from Clydebank who had lived a virtuous enough life — she didn’t lie, or cheat, and sent all three of her children to university — but after my grandfather died she spent a lonely 15 years on the fourth floor of a block of flats that didn’t have a lift, as her neighbors died off and were replaced by hoodlums and drug addicts. And what about the old babushka I had seen crying to herself in the market in Almaty, Kazakhstan, overwhelmed with despair after a lifetime of hardship and sacrifice? Or even Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who won his great battle with the USSR and yet, when interviewed at age 87, asked a German journalist not to wish him “many more years of life.” “Don’t,” he replied. “It’s enough.”
Of course, there are those old people who live into their 90s and, amazed at their longevity, treated each day a gift. But for many others the loneliness, the physical fragility, and the general sense of being excluded from the flow of life can make old age quite difficult, Cicero’s arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. One major consolation, available to rich and poor alike, is the presence of family — and so I was struck that in On Old Age Cicero did not talk about the satisfactions of being surrounded by children and grandchildren. Perhaps, having lost his own daughter, this was a void that even he could not argue into submission, and so he simply wrote it out of the script.
And yet when he came to write about death, and the possibility of surviving death, I noticed that he struck a less skeptical note than he did in On Divination. Cato was willing to allow for the thought that soul was immortal; indeed, he argued that the soul was immortal. And then I saw another reason that Cicero had made Cato his proxy. He too, had lost a child — a son in his case. At the end of the book Cato explained that dying would bring him joy, because it meant he would see his son again. He allowed for the possibility that he might be mistaken, but, then again, he didn’t really care:
…if I am wrong in thinking the human soul immortal, I am glad to be wrong; nor will I allow the mistake which gives me so much pleasure to be wrested from me as long as I live.
In fact, the possibility that oblivion was all that lay in store for him rendered the whole game of winning the argument moot:
…if when dead, as some insignificant philosophers think, I am to be without sensation, I am not afraid of dead philosophers deriding my errors. Again, if we are not to be immortal, it is nevertheless what a man must wish—to have his life end at its proper time.
Alas, Cicero! He wrote these words in 44BC, and was murdered the following year. He had barely made it into old age, yet wrote one of the defining works on old age. It was not the proper time.
Bravo, Daniel!