Cicero had already found poetry (when he was a young man), philosophy and research into the art of public speaking to be useful supports to his status as a public figure. A decade previously he had been able to pick up the threads of his political career after the end of his exile, but now advancing years and Caesar’s autocracy seemed to him to mean that this time there could be no recovery.
So he set about reasserting his reputation as an author. Despite all his other preoccupations, he wrote “from morning to night” (as he told Atticus), producing a flood of books and essays during the next three years. Looking back near the end of his life, he observed: “I have written more in this short time since the collapse of the Republic than I did throughout the many years while the Republic stood.” He hoped his books would be of use to the young but noticed that it was the older generation which took most comfort from them. He knew that his motives for writing were as much for his personal as for the public good. “I cannot easily say how useful I shall be to others: in any case, for my terrible sorrows and all the various troubles that assail me on every side no other consolation could be found.”
Atticus advised his friend to concentrate on historical subjects, but Cicero disagreed. AS he saw it, the first priority was to protect his name as an orator, which was now under some threat. AS early as the mid-50s members of the Catullan/Clodian counterculture had begun to react against the elaborate and ample manner of public speaking which Cicero and, even more so, his onetime rival Hortensius represented. A leading spokesman of this point of view was Catullus’s closest friend, Caius Licinius Calvus. What he called the “Attic” tendency or school of oratory stressed grammatical correctness, simplicity of expression and restraint against the “Bacchic frenzy” of a speaker like Hortensius when he was in full flight. Cicero’s young friend Caelius had probably been another Atticist.
Cicero felt that the time had come to rebut this fashion, partly because it contradicted his own views on oratory but also because he feared that if it got out of hand it would supersede his own achievements. In early 46 he wrote Brutus, a dialogue in which the speakers were Atticus, Brutus (who was an Atticist and to whom the book is dedicated) and himself. It was a history of Latin oratory with brief but telling critiques of Rome’s leading speakers, including an account of his own training and early career. It aimed to be evenhanded and, for example, was highly complimentary of Caesar’s stylistic purity; referring to his histories of the Gallic campaigns and the civil war, Cicero compared them “to nude figures, straight and beautiful; stripped of all ornament of style as if they had stepped out of their clothes.” However, he made it clear that, by definition, public speakers had to attract the interest of the public. Here the Atticists failed because, however correct their Latin, they bored the listener. In the law courts “they are deserted not only by the crowds of bystanders, which is humiliating enough, but by their client’s witnesses and legal advisers.” Brutus was followed later in the year by the Orator, which took the form of a letter to Brutus. It is a technical work and is concerned with the minutiae of rhetorical theory; the focus is on diction and style, for Cicero was aiming his fire once more at the Attic style of oratory.
During the summer of 46 Cicero’s mind turned to questions of philosophy. After producing a squib on the Stoic ethical system, Stoic Paradoxes (Paradoxa stoicorum), Cicero committed himself to a much more ambitious enterprise. This was nothing more nor less than an attempt to give a comprehensive account of Greek philosophy in the Latin language. For one hundred years or so there had been numerous references to Greek philosophers and their doctrines in Roman literature, but there had been few serious books on philosophical themes. Such as there were mainly concerned Epicureanism, a way of life directed at worldly happiness and associated with a materialistic explanation of reality. Cicero deeply disapproved, although he acknowledged that it had given rise to one of the masterpieces of Latin poetry, the epic On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura) by Titus Lucretius Carus, a younger contemporary.
In 44 when the series of books was largely complete, he set out a prospectus of what he felt he had achieved.
In the book called Hortensius I advised my readers to occupy themselves with philosophy—and in the four volumes of the Academic Treatises I suggested the philosophical methods which seem to me to have the greatest degree of appropriate discretion, consistency and elegance. Then in On Supreme Good and Evil I discussed the basic problems of philosophy and covered the whole field in detail in five volumes which set out the arguments for and against every philosophical system. This was followed by Conversations at Tusculum, also in five volumes, which expound the key issues we should bear in mind in our pursuit of happiness. The first volume deals with indifference to death, the second with how to endure pain, the third with the alleviation of distress in times of trouble and the fourth with other distractions which affect our peace of mind. Finally, the fifth book addresses the topic that is best calculated to clarify the nature of philosophy—that is, it demonstrates that moral worth alone is adequate to ensure a happy life. After that, the three volumes of The Nature of the Gods were finished, which cover all the relevant issues. Once that had been adequately dealt with, I started work on my current book, Foretelling the Future. When I have added, as I intend to do, another book, Destiny, the entire field will have been satisfactorily surveyed.
Cicero is explicit that this corpus was an alternative to the public life from which he was barred. In Foretelling the Future, he wrote: “it was through my books that I was addressing the Senate and the people. I took the view that philosophy was a substitute for political activity.” He had always believed that philosophy was an essential ingredient of a training in the art of public speaking and the collapse of the Republic was evidence of the failure by statesmen to apply moral values to their conduct. To develop this long-standing theme was the last gift he could make to his country.
The purpose of the Hortensius, to judge from its surviving fragments, was to establish the uses of philosophy. It was cast as a debate set in the late 60s and the speakers were four leading personalities of the day, including Hortensius and Cicero himself. It contained defenses of poetry, history and oratory. Hortensius attacked the inadequacies of many philosophers and launched a vigorous onslaught on aspects of Epicureanism. Cicero responded with a powerful apologia for philosophy. The seeker after truth traveled hopefully, he said, but would never arrive. Cicero retained the skepticism about the possibility of knowledge that he acquired during his first visit to Athens. He closed with a hint of reincarnation, borrowed from the current revival of interest in the mystical ideas of the Greek sage Pythagoras. The purer a man’s soul, the greater the possibility that it would escape the impending cycle of future lives.
The Academic Treatises (Academica) were started in autumn 46 and Cicero was still working on them the following summer. They were an epistemological inquiry which examined in greater detail than the Hortensius different theories of knowledge. According to Pliny, writing in the following century, the dialogue was composed in Cicero’s villa at Puteoli. The setting and characters were originally the same as in the Hortensius, but once the book was finished its author worried that “the matter did not fit the persons, who could not be supposed ever to have dreamed of such abstrusities.” The problem was solved when he learned that his new friend Varro wanted a part in one of his dialogues, although he was not altogether sure he would take kindly to representing ideas that Cicero would go on to refute. So the work was brought up to the present day and he and Atticus were added as the other speakers. Only one volume of the first version survives (now called Lucullus), along with a fragment of the second.