Paideia Romana: Cicero's Tusculan Disputations

By Ingo Gildenhard

Paideia Romana: Cicero's Tusculan Disputations takes a new look at an unloved text of the western canon to reveal it as a punchy and profoundly original work, arguably Cicero's most ingenious literary response to the tyranny of Caesar. The book shows how the Tusculans' much lambasted literary design, critically isolated prefaces, and overlooked didactic plot start to cohere once we read the dialogue for what it is: not a Latin treatise on Greek philosophy, but a Roman drama on education, with a strong political subtext. The first chapter ('The form – enigmas and answers') tries to make sense of those features of the work that scholars have found baffling or disappointing, such as the nondescript characters, the uncertain genre, or the lack of setting. Chapter 2 ('The prologues – in tyrannum and cultural warfare') analyses how Cicero in his prologues to the five individual books situates his desire to create and teach a 'Latin philosophy' within wider contexts, in particular the dictatorship of Caesar and the intellectual traditions of Greece and Rome. The final chapter 3 ('The plot – teacher and student') explores the pedagogy enacted in the dialogue as a form of constructive outreach, addressed to a future generation of Roman aristocrats. With its emphasis on rhetoric, literary artistry, and historical context, the present volume breaks with earlier scholarship on the Tusculans and thereby makes a significant contribution to the on-going reassessment of Cicero's thought and authorial practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701369

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Cicero’s Disputations at Tusculum are a genuine rarity in our age of postmodern classics. At a time when the righteous rehabilitation of the previously marginalized has become a sure road to professional success, the depreciation of this dialogue persists. Contemporary scholarship on the Tusculans shows few signs of the recent surge in critical correctness that has newly invigorated the study of many a forgotten classic. On the contrary, this unloved text of the western canon continues to provide a convenient target for some innocent fun, superior dismissals, and even outright contempt.¹ Thus Malcolm Schofield takes Cicero to task for not properly addressing himself to ‘the business of practical ethics’, quibbing wryly that to ‘the modern reader’ Cicero’s own high opinion of the work may be a cause of ‘surprise and perhaps dismay’.² Woldemar Görier, after a valiant effort to salvage something positive from the dialogue, ultimately feels obliged to conclude that, ‘all in all, the Tusculans are not a masterpiece’.³ And D. R. Shackleton Bailey even fears that ‘nothing will make the Tusculans into an intellectually satisfying performance’ – not even, that is, the decision of a recent editor to mark up what he considers pointless prolixity in Tusculans 1 and 3 as the result of two successive and partially conflated drafts.⁴

There is, of course, nothing wrong with opinionated criticism of an ancient text.⁵ The term ‘critic’ implies judgement, and in the case of the Tusculans, the author seems guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The amount of circumstantial evidence, at any rate, appears overwhelming, the defects legion. The formal design of the dialogue? Oddly anaemic.⁶ The argumentation? Constantly on the brink of slipping into incoherence.⁷ The practical objective Cicero set himself? Arguably not met.⁸ The purpose of his chosen technique of exposition? Obscure.⁹ The dialogue’s literary qualities? In disputqe, if not outright disappointing. And so the charges against Cicero keep piling up. Prima facie, most of them are perfectly valid. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars are all too willing to throw the book at him. What the Tusculans leave to be desired seems a lot.

The barrage of negative verdicts, then, makes it virtually certain that we are dealing with a failure. It remains to be seen, however, whether it is Cicero who has failed his readers or the modern reader who is failing Cicero. In contrast to the opinio communis, this book argues that the failure is hermeneutic rather than authorial, not one, that is, of composition but one of understanding. Seen against the backdrop of unsympathetic reactions to the Tusculans, the purpose of the following pages is simple: to reveal this dialogue as a hitherto ill-understood work of profound originality.

The view of the work that I would want to advocate can be summarized as follows: written in the summer and autumn of 45, at the height, that is, of Caesar’s power and Cicero’s despair, the Tusculans represent both a climax of, and a watershed in, his literary career.¹⁰ In this dialogue Cicero thematizes in a uniquely compelling fashion the connection between his renewed interests in philosophy and the ‘tyranny’ of Caesar.¹¹ On inspection, the Tusculans emerge as an arresting pendant to the three dialogues that Cicero penned in the 50s, the de Oratore, the de Republica, and the de Legibus. With the commonwealth he idealized in these earlier texts crushed under the heel of Caesar, Cicero was forced to rethink and adjust fundamental tenets of his political philosophy. As recent scholarship has shown, all his late philosophica are implicated in this project, from the Paradoxa Stoicorum and the Brutus onwards.¹² But it is only in the Tusculans that Cicero manages to confront the challenge posed by Caesar to the senatorial tradition of republican government in a way that is equally compelling from an intellectual and a literary point of view. The work, through its very design, registers an outraged protest against the dictator and offers a practical ethics for a Rome in which the republic has been lost and a despot reigns supreme. Hence it arguably is his most successful and certainly his most original continuation of politics by literary means.

The dramatic technique Cicero thought up for this purpose betokens genius. The Tusculans advocate, as well as illustrate in practice, a novel type of education. This point merits emphasis, given that the dialogue is bound to remain a mystery without the recognition that Cicero has set it up as a pedagogical drama. Yet even those critics who are otherwise nicely attuned to the (changing) nuances of Cicero’s literary personae seem to have difficulties in perceiving the Tusculans’ educational plot and its significance for the contents and message of the work. Thus Miriam Griffin notes, quite rightly, that Cicero, in the 40s, adopted a ‘new role as educator of his own and the younger generation’; yet at the same time, she omits to mention the one dialogue in which this role finds its most sustained and explicit articulation.¹³ In the Tusculans Cicero actually teaches: none of his other works, with the possible exception of the Partitiones Oratoriae, gives such prominence to instruction. The dialogue’s didactic plot not only determines Cicero’s choice of dramatis personae but also furthers his ideological missions, in particular his confrontations with Caesar and with Greece. An appreciation of his pedagogic stance as well as its political and philosophical implications are therefore of pivotal importance for our understanding not only of this particular dialogue, but his late philosophica in general.

Cicero’s approach to education in the Tusculans strategically draws on both Greek and Roman elements (hence the paideia Romana of my title), and has a double thrust.¹⁴ It is based on, and proceeds to offer proof of, his conviction (more outspoken here than anywhere else) that Rome is, or has the potential to be, superior to Greece in the realm of culture, including the crucial spheres of philosophy and pedagogy; and it is fueled by an intense hostility towards Caesar. The Tusculans thus have a double purpose: to assert Roman supremacy in the domain of literature and thought and to elaborate a practical ethics for Rome’s ruling élite in the wake of prolonged civil bloodshed and tyranny. This polemic exercise in didacticism allows Cicero to create a nostalgic evocation of the past; condemn, while also providing means to cope with, the present; and adumbrate the prospect of a better future. Surprising though it may seem, the unique design of the dialogue, as remarkable for its uncompromising negativity as for its powerful coherence, operates in conspicuous harmony with the Tusculans’ didactic plot, imperial mission and political message. So often maligned or ignored, the formal outlook of the work is in fact a powerful enactment of Cicero’s political discontent and perfectly suited to further his cultural ambitions. Cicero himself, in any case, places the dialogue, one of the last to appear before the assassination of Caesar, where it belongs: at the centre of his oeuvre.¹⁵

To begin to render this view of the Tusculans plausible, the present volume offers a close analysis of the Tusculans’ literary design (chapter 1), programmatic prefaces (chapter 2), and didactic plot (chapter 3). The first chapter sets out to identify and tackle the artistic challenges posed by the Tusculans in that it tries to make satisfactory (i.e. positive) sense of those aspects of the dialogue that scholars have hitherto found either baffling or disappointing, and have, as a matter of course, chalked up to authorial incompetence. I hope to show that the various enigmas of the Tusculans that have consigned this text to critical purgatory disappear once we start to read the dialogue for what it is: not a Latin treatise in Greek philosophy, but a Roman drama in education with a strong political subtext. The second chapter investigates how Cicero in the five introductions to the individual disputations situates his paideia Romana within wider parameters, in particular the dictatorship of Caesar and the philosophical traditions of Greece and Rome. And chapter 3 explores Cicero’s pedagogy in action, mainly through a detailed analysis of the Tusculans’ ‘dialogic’ passages.

Here, then, the emphasis will be not so much on the philosophical contents of the Tusculans as on their rhetoric, as well as on Cicero as a Roman author and philosophical dramatist. Other aspects of the work are only touched upon in passing, though I hope to return to some of them in future, in particular Cicero’s use of translation from the Greek and the contents of the ‘perfect philosophy’ that he develops and teaches in the dialogue. But I would submit that having grasped the political and artistic logic of the text is, in any case, an indispensable prerequisite for understanding his handling of Greek material as well as his philosophical arguments.¹⁶ Insufficient awareness of what Cicero ‘intended to do in writing what he wrote’¹⁷ is bound to compromise statements about his (use of) sources or criticisms of his apparent lack of conceptual stringency. The present libellus, which scrutinizes those features of the Tusculans that make up the frame and matrix of the dialogue, is therefore also meant as a prolegomenon to a more far-reaching reassessment of Cicero’s thought and authorial practice in this work.

Note on translations

I have provided translations of the Greek and the Latin cited in the main text as well as of the longer quotations from secondary literature not in English. They have no other purpose than aiding in the understanding of the argument.

¹There are of course exceptions. Thus Douglas (1990a) 308 praises the Tusculans as ‘one of Cicero’s most attractive works’, Fuhrmann (1990) 228 deems them ‘eine wegen ihres essayistischen Charakters besonders reizvolle Schrift’ and Simon and Obbink (1996) 1563 appreciate that Cicero here writes ‘with a passionate intensity and lyrical beauty’.

²Schofield (2002), quotations from 105 and 102.

³Görier (1996) 215. He surmises that readers in antiquity will have shared this assessment (189). In the light of my – at times fundamental – disagreements with the opinions expressed by Schofield and Görier, I would like to acknowledge here how much 1 owe to their scholarship and insights in formulating my own views on the Tusculans.

⁴Shackleton Bailey (1986) 736, in his review of Giusta’s 1984 edition of the Tusculans.

⁵On the role of value judgements in the analysis of literary texts, see Silk (2001), though his essay is mainly concerned with identifying positive value in literary language – a rather different enterprise from the ad hominem derision that is so widespread in scholarship on Cicero.

⁶This is the impression of virtually all modem commentators.

⁷The charge is something of a leitmotif in Gigon’s (1992) and Douglas’s (1985) (1990a) commentaries.

⁸Schofield (2002) 105.

⁹Douglas (1990a) 7.

¹⁰For the date of the Tusculans see further Appendix A.

¹¹For Cicero’s stigmatization of Caesar as a tyrant, ever since his crossing of the Rubicon, see Gildenhard (2006).

¹²See e.g. Bringmann (1971), Heilmann (1982), Strasburger (1990), Habicht (1990), Wassmann (1996), Gotter (2001), Lefèvre (2001), Arweiler (2003), and, most recently, Steel (2005). Despite this body of scholarship, in other quarters the view still persists that Cicero’s late philosophica are mere introductions (well-written, to be sure) to issues in Greek philosophy. See e.g. Striker (1995).

¹³Griffin (1997) 11. She refers to the Brutus, the Orator, N.D. 1.8, Div. 2.4 and Off. 1.4 in support of her point but passes over the Tusculans in silence.

¹⁴The term paideia highlights the difference between ‘education’, i.e. a deliberate programme of teaching, and ‘socialization’, i.e. ‘the process by which culture is transmitted from one generation to the next’ (Whiting (1968) 545, cited by Luhmann (2002) 48 n.1). Cicero develops his pedagogy in the Tusculans in response to what he perceives to be a blatant defect of Roman socialization, i.e. the failure to inculcate in the last generation of the Roman republic the attitudes, values and behavioural patterns that sustained the (now ruined) commonwealth of the ancestors. Cf. Luhmann (2002) 54: ‘Erziehung wird eingerichtet, um das zu ergänzen oder zu korrigieren, was als Resultat von Sozialisation zu erwarten ist.’

¹⁵See the survey of his works at the opening of Div. 2 with Schofield (2002) 102: ‘... this work is indubitably the centrepiece of the whole account.’ Schmidt (1995) 231 correctly identifies the Tusculans as the climax of Cicero’s programme of philosophical polemic in his second phase of writing.

¹⁶An old insight. Already Leo admonished that an understanding of Cicero’s philosophical oeuvre cannot proceed without close attention to his literary artistry (1912) 432. See more recently Blößner (2001).

¹⁷To put the point in the idiom of speech-act hermeneutics. For an exposition of the theoretical frame within which I here approach the Tusculans, see the papers by Skinner in Tully (1988).

CHAPTER 1: THE FORM – ENIGMAS AND ANSWERS

Introduction

Scholars agree that the literary format of the Tusculans is peculiar. Three features tend to puzzle most. First, there is Cicero’s choice of the continuous lecture as his preferred mode of discourse, which has raised questions about the Tusculans’ genre. Is the work a disputatio or a schola, a senilis declamatio or a sermo (these are Cicero’s own labels, used at various places in the dialogue), or, perhaps, an offspring of that mysterious entity, the Hellenistic diatribe? Second, Cicero opted for an anonymous and inexpressive stooge as his one and only interlocutor – a seemingly improsperous and quite inexplicable decision by someone who knows how to sparkle with masterful ethopoeia. Finally, the setting. In contrast to the absorbing mises-en-scène of some of his other dialogues, that of the Tusculans appears uninspired and sketchy, to the point of being ‘pratiquement inexistante’.¹

This design, which is indeed unusual, has left critics nonplussed. Görier, for instance, candidly admits that Cicero’s ‘eigentümliche Konzeption’ leaves him ‘ein wenig ratios’.² Douglas, too, seems at a loss, stating categorically that the generic enigmas of the text are intractable. ‘It is not possible to decide why Cicero chose this particular technique’, he announces, before vaguely submitting that it may have been ‘an urge to seek some artistic variety’, a willingness to be more ‘dogmatic’ after the survey approach of the de Finibus or the attempt to search for common ground among the philosophical schools.³ Görier and Douglas are, arguably, the two scholars who have tried hardest to come to terms with the literary profile of the Tusculans. Other critics prefer to bypass the formal problems posed by the work altogether. There is a distinct tendency to ignore its aberrant idiosyncrasies or to ascribe them to some sort of authorial failure – such as excessive haste in composition, a lapse in critical judgement or a drained imagination.⁴

Yet baffling as some critics find the Tusculans, a full appreciation is still missing of just how strange they truly are – so strange, indeed, that they constitute a veritable monstrum within Cicero’s oeuvre: a portentous entity, that is, which testifies to a serious disturbance in the order of things. In the first part of this chapter (entitled ‘Enigmas’), I try to plumb the full measure of the Tusculans’ monstrosity by taking stock of what, in the dialogue, is extraordinary or abnormal: the title, the genre, the dramatis personae, the setting, the excessively long translations from Greek tragedy, and Cicero’s endorsement of Epicurus. If one keeps to the hermeneutic principle Ciceronem e Cicerone explicare, this task is not particularly difficult. A simple exercise in comparison shows that, in the Tusculans, Cicero has not just thrown to the winds techniques of composition that belong to the hallmarks of his literary imagination, but also flaunts that he has done so. On inspection, it becomes evident that he is absolutely forthright in confessing that what he does in this dialogue borders on the perverse.

Once it is evident, however, that Cicero draws ostentatious attention to the peculiarities of his text, we can no longer dismiss his literary choices as the unfortunate result of authorial inadequacy. If his breaches of convention are deliberate, then it follows that they must also be part of the message. A necessary first step towards doing Cicero hermeneutic justice is thus the realization that the ruinous aspects of the Tusculans are intentional and coherent, rather than the result of incompetence or sloppiness. In the second half of the chapter (‘Answers’) I attempt to work out the underlying logic of Cicero’s seemingly unavailing and resourceless design. The aim is to show that those features of the dialogue that have caused critical despair amount to a tactics of negativity, which in turn contributes to a larger, overarching vision. This vision constitutes a sophisticated attempt to intervene and position himself by literary means in Rome’s political field⁵ and would not have been lost on Cicero’s intended readers, his aristocratic peers.⁶ In the end, the Tusculans should emerge as a text that not only coheres from an artistic point of view, but also carries a pugnacious political punch.

A. Enigmas

I. The title

The peculiarities of the Tusculanae Disputationes begin with their title. Douglas renders it with ‘Discussions at my country-house in Tusculum’, adding: ‘It is small wonder that few now penetrate beyond covers bearing so forbidding a title into the text of the least demanding of Cicero’s larger philosophical writings.’⁷ Forbidding as the title may be, we know for certain that it is Cicero’s own, despite the fact that, within his oeuvre, it is one of a kind.⁸ In most of his other titles, Cicero announces his subject matter; a few consist in the name of a leading speaker or interlocutor; and two are composite, in combining the name of the protagonist with the topic of his discourse.⁹ With ‘Disputations at Tusculum’, in contrast, Cicero has, for once, decided to foreground neither subject matter nor character, but genre (disputatio) and location (his villa in Tusculum). The title, then, is strikingly uncharacteristic.¹⁰

Possibly, Cicero followed Greek precedents. Commentators routinely cite the Corinthian and Lesbian dialogues of Dicaearchus as potential models, primarily because Cicero mentions them in the work.¹¹ Per se, though, these references do not amount to compelling evidence for deliberate imitation, even if any ‘Greek’ connotation of the title would fit well with other aspects of Cicero’s self-fashioning in the Tusculans. More important, at any rate, than Cicero’s sources is the fact that he breaks with his usual habit. The title instantly announces that he is up to something out of the ordinary. The cover-page prominence Cicero gives to the dialogue’s form and setting, precisely those features, that is, which modern scholars consider to be among the work’s least satisfactory, should put readers on the alert that, despite appearances, the generic affiliations and the location of the Tusculans are of paramount importance.

II. Genre

Generic expectations play a crucial role in literary communication. From the point of view of reception, a text is subject to radical shifts in meaning depending on the generic assumptions that the audience brings to bear on it. It follows that the proper decoding of the generic information provided by the author is a necessary (if by no means sufficient) prerequisite for understanding his intended meaning and message. ‘Getting the genre right’ therefore matters, yet it is often easier said than done. The Tusculans are a case in point. Many commentators are content with the tautological repetition of the labels that Cicero uses himself (as if they were self-explanatory).¹² And if discussion of the dialogue’s generic features takes place at all, it tends towards the scholastic, with little bearing upon larger problems of interpretation. Thus the most lively debate that the genre of the Tusculans has so far stirred up has revolved around the somewhat idle question of whether or not Cicero might have written in the tradition of the Hellenistic diatribe.¹³

More often, formal aspects of the work are set aside altogether, as scholars zoom in on the philosophical contents of Cicero’s lengthy expositions. Bringmann, for instance, limits his discussion of generic artistry to the observation that ‘in essence’ the dialogue consists in five internally coherent lectures, ‘von dialektischen Eingangs- und Zwischenpartien abgesehen’.¹⁴ This is a reasonably accurate description of the work’s overall outlook. But it reduces form to a formality. One need not recall Derrida’s logic of the supplement to suspect that excepting the dialectic passages from consideration may unduly flatten out the intricacies of Cicero’s rhetorical design and hence of his message as well.

The best point of departure for a fresh look at the genre of the Tusculans is therefore Douglas’s insight that in this work ‘Cicero uses a method different from that of all his other dialogues’.¹⁵ As with the title, we are faced with the challenge to explicate uniqueness – and a uniqueness, at that, which does not seem to make any sense. Significant problems surface irrespective of whether we investigate (a crucial distinction) the genre of the dialogue or the genres mentioned or practised within it. Most of Cicero’s generic labels as well as the genres of philosophical discourse he pursues in the work are in flagrant violation of social conventions that he observes elsewhere in his oeuvre.

1. Cicero’s generic labels

As already mentioned, Cicero refers to the doings he depicts in the Tusculans with four different generic markers: disputatio (or the verb disputare);¹⁶ the Greek term schola;¹⁷ senilis declamatio;¹⁸ and sermo.¹⁹ Of the lot, only sermo is unambiguously positive. The three others, while in many ways distinct, share one surprising characteristic: they are all laden with (more or less) pejorative connotations. In other words, at key moments in his text Cicero sees fit to express disdain for his current activity. Prima facie, such a policy of negative advertisement is oddly self-defeating and perhaps for that reason has tended to elude modem readers – although they frequently express (heuristically valuable) bafflement over Cicero’s lexical choices.²⁰ But a detailed look at his generic markers, at what they mean and imply, should render the conundrum ineluctable.

a. disputatio

The most innocuous of the three terms is disputatio.²¹ In the majority of cases, Cicero’s use of disputatio and the verb disputare is primarily descriptive. It is what people do when they talk philosophy. He frequently uses it, both on its own and in conjunction with sermo, to render the Greek δiάλoγoc. As a technical term, its meaning is, roughly, ‘systematic philosophical discussion’ – in complement and contrast to sermo, a word that places greater stress on conversation and urbanity.²² But for that very reason, disputatio could not help but resonate with foreign connotations: ‘Griechischer Schulbetrieb, griechische Denk- und Lehrweise, Logik und Systematik sind … die Begleitvorstellungen, die das Wort disputatio weckt.’²³ Put differently, a disputatio on philosophical doctrine was a Greek type of discourse and, as such, incommensurate with the social status of a Roman aristocrat. In part, Cicero solved the ensuing paradox by using the very term disputatio to demarcate ethnic differences. In a dialectic strategy of appropriation and rejection, both he and the protagonists of his dialogues routinely ridicule the Greek version of the genre, only to develop and endorse an acceptable Roman alternative. This strategy is most apparent in the de Oratore, which features recurrent and programmatic tussles over the meaning of the term. As foil for what Cicero does in the Tusculans, these tussles merit a closer look.

In the early parts of this dialogue Cicero stages a veritable comedy of manners about the squeamishness of Crassus to deliver anything that would resemble a disputation. The legendary orator, afraid of committing a faux pas he considers worthy of a Greek, recoils in horror from the proposition, while his visitors try to coax their host into sharing his knowledge. As Jon Hall notes, the dialogue features ‘some nine conversational exchanges’ which revolve around Crassus’ ‘attempts at evasion’.²⁴ This rigmarole finally culminates in the paradoxical quip by witty Caesar Strabo that he much enjoyed the disputatio, which Crassus gave in refusing to deliver a disputatio.²⁵ Hall rightly interprets this sequence of deferrals as part of Cicero’s concerted effort ‘to counteract the conventional Roman suspicion of philosophical debate’. A cultural difference is being marked and enacted: ‘Since such discourses were regarded as typically Greek, Crassus’ reluctance is intended to distinguish him from the more loquacious, tongue-wagging Greekling.’²⁶ Indeed, as Crassus points out at the opening of de Oratore 2, the Greeks do not know what manners are, as witnessed by the fact that their very language lacks a word for ‘impropriety’. And by far their grossest vice is to engage in idle talk on technical subjects.²⁷

The penchant for verbal diarrhoea that Romans attributed to Greek intellectuals ill befitted a Roman nobilis, and Cicero, precisely since he was importing Greek subject matter, draws a rigid cordon sanitaire between the uncivilized talkers from the East and his Roman protagonists.²⁸ While repeatedly emphasising that he and his characters would not dream of wasting time on the sort of disputatio favoured by laughable Greeks, Cicero validates a Roman version of the genre. At de Oratore 1.104–5, the venerable Scaevola draws a clear-cut distinction between a disputatio Graeca and a disputatio Romana, which is grounded in what he perceives to be basic differences between the two peoples. Responding to Crassus’ insistent refusal to entertain his guests with ‘disputations of that kind’ (istius modi disputationibus, i.e. the disreputable ones of the Greeks), he contrasts the everyday loquacity of the Greeks who deliver their impractical sing-songs in schools with the distinguished eloquence of a noble Roman speaker of Crassus’ stature. Scaevola praises his friend as the wisest and most eloquent of all, who has established his unrivalled pre-eminence in council and oratory not by penning booklets, but in decisive law cases and at the very centre of power and glory. Crassus should therefore cease to shirk his responsibility and proceed to enlighten the young with a learned exposition, informed by his profound knowledge and experience. The term he uses to designate this discourse is disputatio.²⁹

In the course of such banter a disputatio on oratory by a Roman aristocrat, delivered to his peers in a rare hour of leisure, gradually becomes an acceptable component of Roman villa-culture, of course within strictly defined boundaries. Differences in speaker and context outweigh similarities of form to render the genre of disputatio an acceptable Roman mode of discourse. Cicero marks this expansion of decorum through a ring composition of sorts. Not coincidentally, he uses the term sermo to refer to the exhausting political discussion that took place at Crassus’ villa before the host, to relax everyone’s mind, brought up the subject of training in oratory. At the end of the work, Crassus breaks off the disputatio on oratory (apparently having made his peace with the genre; at 1.118 and elsewhere he resolutely refused to refer to his discourse by this name) and calls for relaxation.³⁰ Leeman, Pinkster and Nelson pin down the strategic intent behind Cicero’s play with generic concepts: ‘… die Grenzen des decorum haben sich verschoben.’³¹ Not only has the systematic discussion of oratory become part of Roman aristocratic culture; far from being a trifling task, the exposition of the principles of public speech has proved to be a strenuous undertaking worthy of the same effort and energy as political deliberations.

But, as the reception of the Catulus evinces, the portrayal of noble figures engrossed in intellectual matters remained difficult. Cicero himself admitted that in this particular dialogue he pushed the envelope too far. The notion that his cast of noble characters (Catulus, Lucullus, and Hortensius) once gathered to debate epistemological niceties just did not sound plausible. And thus, in the preface to Lucullus, he tinds (or puts) himself on the defensive.³² The (imagined) negative response of (some of) his readers indicates the existence of notional boundaries beyond which Cicero’s literary fictions lost their historical credibility. There is, then, a real tension between the Greek disputatio and Rome’s aristocratic milieu which Cicero is fully aware of and often negotiates with subtle skill and wit. In the de Oratore and elsewhere, he exploits this tension in his effort to domesticate Greek learning at Rome, suggesting that the disputationes which his Roman nobles deliver, having gone through the requisite demurrals (no one ever volunteers), differ in kind from those of Greek intellectuals. The auctoritas of his characters and several other factors obfuscate, to the point of rendering irrelevant, any (objectionable) Greek origins.

In this light it is striking that, in the Tusculans, Cicero deliberately exacerbates the mismatch between discourse and context, by serving up his disputations ‘raw’ – without, that is, the social dressing he was wont to apply to make this genre palatable to his Roman readers. In this dialogue, one looks in vain for those devices that Cicero invented for the specific purpose of transforming the delivery of a disputation from a violation of decorum into an aristocratic obligation. There is no casual aside that the participants turned to more technical subjects only after exhausting other, more urgent, topics of conversation; no social foreplay revolving around the diffidence on the part of the designated speaker and the insistent pleading by his friends to overcome his scruples for the benefit of all; no attempt at avoiding the impression of lecturing; and no reassuring reminder that the performance is out of character. Such apologetic touches are almost entirely absent from the Tusculans.³³ Far from justifying his disputations with reference to Roman manners, Cicero here turns his attention instantly and without ado to matters philosophical; brashly volunteers to lecture, under the disagreeable conceit that his skills in declaiming now rival those of ‘tongue-wagging Greetings’; and holds forth to his heart’s content, approximating a prolixity of Greek dimensions.

In short, instead of downplaying the Greek horizon of his activity, he does the exact opposite. The Tusculans feature no attempt to conceal the foreign habit of philosophical discussion under a Roman veneer. As the title announces, they are, and contain the record of, ‘Greek’ disputationes – pure and simple.³⁴ The upshot of all this is an ostentatious break with precisely those rules of Roman decorum he so carefully defined and observed in his other works.

b. schola and exercitatio

Problems of propriety exponentially increase with the second of Cicero’s terms, i.e. schola, a Greek word that can mean both ‘lecture’ and ‘school’, with the one obviously taking place in the other.³⁵ Cicero stresses twice that he has turned his villa in Tusculum into a Greek school and that the work itself contains the scholae he delivered in the course of a five-day period (Tusc. 1.7 and 1.8):

in quam exercitationem ita nos studiose operam dedimus, ut iam etiam scholas Graecorum more habere auderemus.³⁶ (1.7)

I have applied myself so assiduously to this exercise that nowadays I even venture to hold lectures in the manner of the Greeks.

itaque dierum quinque scholas, ut Graeci appellant, in totidem libros contuli. (1.8)

And so I have recorded the scholae (‘lectures’), as the Greeks call them, of five days in as many books.

These sentences startle. If one considers Cicero’s contemptuous attitude towards ‘lecture-giving Greeks’ and their Roman epigones both within the Tusculans and elsewhere in his oeuvre, his frank admission of ‘daring’ to hold school in the Greek manner, indeed, as if he were a Greek, shocks. A glance at the other occurrences of schola in the Tusculans shows that Cicero associated the lecture with the milieu, and the practitioners, of professional philosophy, from which he was normally at pains to distance himself. Thus in Tusc. 1.83 he recounts the anecdote of king Ptolemy withdrawing Hegesias’ permission to teach after his lectures on death resulted in a wave of suicides.³⁷ At Tusc. 1.113, Cicero begins his epilogue to the lesson of the day with a somewhat dismissive reference to the custom of Greek schools. At Tusc. 2.26, it emerges that during his visit to Athens the interlocutor has spent a considerable amount of time in scholis philosophorum – apparently without learning much.³⁸ In the third disputation, Cicero contrasts his own economy with the loquacity of Greek thinkers, who, instead of briskly dispatching with the topic of distress in one general lecture (as he does), deliver separate scholae, or even write entire books, on each of its many causes.³⁹ The (slightly pathetic) reason for this prolixity is that these idling intellectuals have too much time on their hands and need something to do.⁴⁰ Criticism of the unrestrained verbal profusion to which Greek philosophers are prone is also implied at Tusc. 5.25, when Cicero mentions that Theophrastus came under attack et libris et scholis omnium philosophorum for putting fortuna, rather than sapientia, in charge of life.

The schola does not fare much better outside the Tusculans. In his invective against Piso, Cicero exploits the gap between the Epicurean doctrine that Piso picked up ‘in school’ and the certainties of Roman cultural knowledge. He consistently uses the term in the sense of both school and lecture to mock his opponent’s philosophical pretensions, especially Piso’s claim that he never cared for celebrating a triumph. Zooming in on this high-handed dismissal of the apex of Roman ambition, Cicero derides Piso as a homo … concinnus, perfectus, politus ex schola who, having failed to win a triumph, will now no doubt lecture on it: vertes ad alteram scholam: disseres de triumpho.⁴¹ The schola, in short, is either for political losers (like Piso), or for those, as the Tusculan passages show, who do not want to pursue a political career in the first place (Greek philosophers).⁴²

Moreover, Cicero at times derides the schola even as a mode of philosophical discourse. At the opening of de Finibus 2 (the work which immediately preceded the Tusculans), he begins his lengthy disquisition by explicitly asking his audience not to confuse what follows with the schola of a professional philosopher (Fin. 2.1):

‘Primum’ inquam ‘deprecor ne me tamquam philosophum putetis scholam vobis aliquam explicaturum, quod ne in ipsis quidem philosophis magnopere umquam probavi.’

I began by saying, ‘First of all, I plead with you not to suppose that I am about to deliver some lecture for you as if I were a philosopher. Indeed, not even in the case of philosophers have I ever much approved of this procedure.’

Cicero’s apologetic beginning contains a double dissociation. He is keen to distance himself from both the schola as a genre and from those who are known to perform in it, that is, professional philosophers. In fact, he doubts the propriety of the schola even for philosophers and their ilk (ne…quidem), thus branding the ‘Greek lecture’ as utterly beyond the pale in Rome’s aristocratic milieu.

The schola, then, in the sense of either school or lecture, has no place in Cicero’s dialogues. In many ways, it functions as the ‘Greek other’, that is referred to negatively, to throw the superior Roman modes of conversation into proper relief. With the exception of that of the Tusculans, Cicero’s literary worlds are the contrived opposite of all that smacked of ‘Greek school’, and delivering a schola is precisely what his noble speakers eschew like the plague. The formulations in the prologue to Tusculan 1, however, seem to suggest that, surprisingly, Cicero has overcome his aversion to the genre. Indeed, it now appears that he even takes pride in having reached, through strenuous exercise, such a high level of skill and expertise in lecturing that he could perform in a Greek school. In a most peculiar fashion, Cicero makes the opprobrium attached to the schola in his previous works here backfire upon himself.

Tusc. 1.7 contains another term that has justly raised eyebrows: exercitatio. Now it is true that Cicero set great store by the concept. In the de Oratore, ‘practice’ is the third aspect after natura and ars that accounts for the perfect orator.⁴³ But Cicero does not usually advocate exercitatio as an end in itself or as preparation for a career in school. In his other dialogues, the purpose of oratorical exercises is only and always their application in the law courts, the forum, and the senate.⁴⁴ When it suits him, Cicero backs up this point with reference to the Roman ideology of military labor. Those who shirk the public stage, his language at times implies, not only let down the commonwealth, but, in cowardly fashion, fail to put their mettle to the test.⁴⁵ After perusal of Tusc. 1.7, however, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Cicero here outs himself as one of those who dodge their duty. Far from preparing him for future performances in the public limelight, the exercitationes which he portrays himself as ‘eagerly’ (studiose) pursuing only prime him for the sterile showmanship and idle entertainment on endless display in the schools of the philosophers – an arena of debate that Cicero disparages elsewhere as ‘unmanly’ and ‘private’⁴⁶ Given that, for Cicero, there is something distinctly disreputable and effeminate about the chatter of those who ply their speech in academic seclusion, far removed, that is, from the tough realities of public oratory with its investment in virtus and virility, dignity and status, his selfportrayal in the Tusculans amounts to an act of emasculation.

Moreover, even in the philosophical setting of this dialogue, Cicero’s emphasis on exercitatio strikes a discordant note. As Gigon remarks:⁴⁷

Cicero veranstaltet Übungen in der rhetorisch geschulten Philosophie. … Die Stelle ist sonderbar, ja, wenn man die späteren Ausführungen bedenkt, geradezu verwirrend. Denn hier scheint er das ganze Gewicht auf die methodische exercitatio zu legen. … Es scheint sich also um ein Stück schulmäßiger philosophischer Diskussionskunst zu handeln anhand von irgendwelchen Thesen ….

Gigon has every right to be perplexed. Exercitatio implies the pedantic insistence upon mechanical skills, rather than the Socratic search for insights that both approximate the truth and are of practical relevance. In all, then, it is difficult to imagine how Cicero could have thought up a more awkward way to describe his doings.

c. declamatio

Next declamatio, with the attribute senilis. Cicero likewise uses this phrase twice:

ut enim antea declamitabam causas, quod nemo me diutius fecit, sic haec mihi nunc senilis est declamatio (Tusc. 1.7).

Just as previously I used to declaim on legal cases, which nobody did longer than I, so this serves me now as declamation for an old man.

itaque postquam adamavi hanc quasi senilem declamationem, studiose equidem utor nostris poetis (Tusc. 2.26).

Thus I for my part, having fallen deeply in love with this declamation for an old man, as you might call it, am keen on using our poets.

Once again, we are faced with a formulation that perplexes, and for various reasons.⁴⁸ For a start, declamatio is itself a term of dubious pedigree.⁴⁹ Second, the genre is utterly unsuited to the pursuit of philosophy – formal exercises in speaking may be ideal preparation for handling cases in a law court, but they do not square well with the search for wisdom.⁵⁰ And third, there is the adjective senilis. A Roman senex, especially if he was, like Cicero, a consularis, was not supposed to idle away his time in making the porticos of his villa ring, in the vain attempt to hone skills in lecturing and declaiming. The raison d’etre of his being was to exercise his auctoritas in the running of the state by providing wise and judicious council (consilium). Cicero here falls woefully short of his definition of the sapiens at Tusc. 1.91, who, despite his full awareness that death may strike at any time, nevertheless is fully devoted to caring for family and state (quo minus in omne tempus rei p. suisque consulat) – to say nothing of the ideal old age outlined by Crassus in the de Oratore. Crassus envisages the senex in honourable retirement after a successful completion of the cursus honorum, dispensing legal wisdom as a iuris consultus, a sought-after ‘oracle’ as it were for the entire citizenry.⁵¹ In contrast, Cicero depicts his recent activity to which the Tusculans bear witness as an ignominious regression to childish pursuits, in that he does as a senex what he once did as an adulescens. Senilis declamatio is a contradictio in adiecto.⁵²

d. sermo

On occasion, Cicero refers to the proceedings that the Tusculans purport to record with sermo. The term connotes a conversation on philosophical matters among friends who are either walking (Tusc. 2.10) or sitting (Tusc. 5.11) and carries none of the negative intellectual and Greek associations of disputatio or schola. But Cicero’s use of sermo creates more problems than it solves. In particular we have to ask ourselves why he did not maintain a consistent perspective on the Tusculans throughout the work, but preferred instead a dominant negativity with the occasional gesture to a more appealing model of intellectual exchange. Sermo acquires its full significance only against Cicero’s troubling tendency to designate his work elsewhere with labels that carry a decidedly negative semantic charge. In all, then, the survey of Cicero’s labels has produced twisted results. With three of them, he deprecates what he is doing, thereby inviting us to ponder the purpose of his strikingly negative approach to authorial self-fashioning in the Tusculans. With the use of sermo, he occasionally casts a positive light on the proceedings, suggesting at least some affinities with the conversations among Roman nobles that he depicts in his other works.

2. Cicero’s generic practice

As his labels, the philosophical techniques that Cicero uses in the course of the dialogue present an intransigent set of puzzles. Overall, he applies a hodge-podge of procedures, composed of the modi operandi of various schools and figures. His eclecticism becomes apparent once we set what unfolds in the Tusculans against the brief history of philosophical methods in de Finibus 2 (Fin. 2.2):

Is [sc. Socrates] enim percontando atque interrogando elicere solebat eorum opiniones quibuscum disserebat, ut ad ea quae ii respondissent si quid videretur diceret, qui mos cum a posterioribus non esset retentus, Arcesilas eum revocavit instituitque ut ii qui se audire vellent non de se quaererent, sed ipsi dicerent quid sentirent; quod cum dixissent, ille contra, sed eum qui audiebant, quoad poterant, defendebant sententiam suam, apud ceteros autem philosophos qui quaesivit aliquid tacet; quod quidem iam fit etiam in Academia, ubi enim is qui audire vult ita dixit, Voluptas mihi videtur esse summum bonum, perpetua oratione contra disputatur, ut facile intellegi possit eos qui aliquid sibi videri dicant non ipsos in ea sententia esse sed audire velle contraria.

For Socrates used to elicit the beliefs of his interlocutors through questioning and cross-examination so that he could, if he wished, speak in reply to their answers. His successors abandoned this habit, but Arcesilaus revived it and established that those who wished to hear him speak should not question him but state their own views. Once they had done so, he would try to refute them; but his audience would defend their views as best they could. Among the other philosophers, on the other hand, it is customary for whoever has asked a question then to listen in silence. Indeed, this happens nowadays even in the Academy. For whenever anyone who wants to listen has put forth a thesis such as ‘in my opinion pleasure is the highest good’, someone else argues against it in a continuous speech, so that it is readily apparent that those who set forth the initial thesis are not themselves committed to it but simply want to hear arguments to the contrary.

Cicero here outlines three different ways of doing philosophy. First, there is the one preferred by Socrates. It consists in the interplay of question and answer, aimed at eliciting the opinion of a partner in conversation before putting it to the test. In Cicero’s version of the Socratic model, the person in charge of the interrogation need not necessarily reveal his own point of view. The second approach Cicero associates with Arcesilaus. It involves someone in the audience stating his opinion on a matter first, before the philosopher in charge argues against it. Once the views of the amateur and the professional are on the table further debate ensues. Finally, Cicero outlines the procedure favoured by the New Academy. It consists in someone advancing a thesis, to be refuted by someone else in a continuous lecture. It is important to note, though, that whoever performs in the role of stooge, does so as devil’s advocate. Cicero is explicit in stressing that the one who puts forward the thesis does not actually endorse it.

Intriguingly, the proceedings depicted in the Tusculans show affinities with all three methods of operation that Cicero surveys in the de Finibus passage.⁵³ The five individual disputations all take as their point of departure a New Academic ‘debate-formula’, along the lines of voluptas mihi videtur summum bonum.⁵⁴ But Cicero alters the New Academic scenario in one crucial detail. Unlike the advocati diaboli who ply their trade in the philosophical schools, the stooge who sets forth the propositions in the Tusculans actually believes in them. This adjustment of the New Academic scenario surprises. The figure of the devil’s advocate is, in many ways, ideally suited for the domestication of Greek philosophy at Rome. It permits the rehearsal and critique of diverse opinions while avoiding social embarrassment. If whoever advances the thesis that is being refuted does not believe in it, no one is shown up as being wrong, or, worse, morally depraved. Cicero makes good use of the advocatus diaboli in the de Republican where Philus performs in this role to expound Carneades’ views on justice. He does so with great reluctance, and only after Laelius reassures him that no-one will think that he approves of them. In the interest of the argument and with a sigh of resigned protest, he agrees to ‘dirty himself knowingly’.⁵⁵ The ploy thus allows Cicero to portray a cohesive aristocracy united by a common intellectual outlook and culture and therefore unanimous in their disapproval of Greek subversive thought, while simultaneously granting this thought a critical airing.

More generally speaking, Cicero’s dialogues do not usually feature the admission of any one character to have been in the wrong, thus losing face by having to concede defeat in intellectual debate. Differences in opinion are either reconciled or left open.⁵⁶ Even those of his works in which a variety of incompatible views find a hearing and Cicero renders his own preferences explicit (such as the de Finibus), do not end in an enforced ‘conversion’. The Epicurean Torquatus remains an Epicurean in spite of Cicero’s stringent critique of Epicurean doctrine.⁵⁷ In the Tusculans, however, things work very differently. The fact that the interlocutor does not simply provide the artificial pegs on which a respondent may hang his discourse but actually voices deeply felt personal credos has profound implications for the relationship between him and Cicero. The New Academic practice presupposes an in-group of philosophical peers who set each other up in a game of intellectual showmanship. In contrast, what transpires in the Tusculans is much closer to the Socratic elenchus: a testing of a person (Cicero’s young partner in dialogue) and his system of beliefs.⁵⁸ And because his interlocutor is committed to what Cicero regards as erroneous beliefs, he is able to combine the oratio perpetua (or schola) of the New Academy with elements of Socratic inquisition (in particular in Tusc. 1 and 2) and the sort of follow-up debate that is the hallmark of Arcesilaus (in particular in Tusc. 5).

What compounds the difficulty of assigning the Tusculans to one specific method of philosophy is the fact that, in the preface to Tusculan 1, Cicero gives two contradictory accounts of what transpired at his villa. One of them resembles the intellectual Glasperlenspiel that disciples of the New Academy were fond of playing; the other looks identical to Arcesilaus’ method of operation (Tusc. 1.7–8):

ponere iubebam, de quo quis audire vellet; ad id aut sedens aut ambulans disputabam. (8) itaque dierum quinque scholas, ut Graeci appellant, in totidem libros contuli, fiebat autem ita ut, cum is qui audire vellet dixisset quid sibi videretur, tum ego contra dicerem, haec est enim, ut scis, vetus et Socratica ratio contra alterius opinionem disserendi, nam ita facillime, quid veri simillimum esset, inveniri posse Socrates arbitrabatur.

I bade anyone to propose a topic he wanted to hear about. This I discussed either sitting or walking. (8) And so I have recorded the scholae (‘lectures’), as the Greeks call them, of five days in as many books. It happened in such a way that he who wanted to listen stated his view first and then I spoke against it. As you know, this is the old Socratic policy of arguing against another person’s belief. Socrates thought that one could thus find out most easily what comes closest to the truth.

In Tusc. 1.7, Cicero invokes a New Academic habit that goes back to Gorgias. He depicts himself among a group of friends and asks someone to put forth a (any) thesis for discussion. There is no intimation that personal beliefs are put to the test. The point of the exercise seems rather to enable Cicero to showcase his newly honed facilities in epideictic rhetoric. In Tusc. 1.8, on the other hand, Cicero tells us that his lectures took as their point of departure someone else’s personal belief and are directed towards approximating the truth.⁵⁹ This is the practice that Cicero, in the de Finibus, ascribes to Socrates and Arcesilaus. The only critic who has spotted the ensuing contradiction in the Tusculans seems to have been Giusta, who proposes a radical solution:⁶⁰

Non c’è bisogno di dimostrare che nel passo delle Tusculane il tratto Fiebat autem etc. corrisponde a ciò che del metodo di Socrate e di Arcesilao è detto nel passo del De finibus. Ma altrettanto chiaro è che il tratto Ponere iubebam etc. corrisponde a ciò che nel passo del De finibus è detto del metodo gorgiano: basta a provarlo il confronto fra la frase Ponere iubebam de quo quis audire uellet e quellaprimus est ausus Leontinus Gorgias … iubere dicere qua de re quis uellet audire. Pertanto, essendo inconciliabili i due metodi, bisogna pensare che siano inconciliabili anche i due tratti in cui Cicerone dichiara prima di avere seguito l’uno, poi invece di avere seguito l’altro. Con ogni probabilità il