The influence of Cicero upon the history of European literature and ideas greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer in any language. In most of the literary, political, religious, ethical, and educational conoversies that have gravely agitated western mankind he has been passionately and incessantly quoted – usually by both sides.
Though his immediate following was not very extensive – for instance his younger contemporary Pollio thought his speeches exuberantly insincere – it was soon declared (by Livy) that only another Cicero could praise him adequately. He was canonized, as a model of superlative eloquence, character, and citizenship, by the greatest of Roman educationalists, Quintilian; and the satirist Juvenal, though mocking his poetry and his timidity, speaks of the Second Philippic as ‘divine’.
Lactantius, known as the ‘Christian Cicero’, declared that in his treatises Cicero ‘contributed a great deal of his own’, and found On Duties adaptable to the needs of the Church; Ambrose’s On the Duties of Ministers owes very much to the same source, and his Epistles deliberately imitate Ciceronian diction and form. For Jerome and Augustine Cicero symbolized the pagan culture whose vanities Christianity had rejected. Yet Jerome, in a dream, saw himself arraigned before the Seat of Judgement as more Ciceronian than Christian, and Augustine, though me City of God was written to oppose Cicero’s conception of Providence, writes of his treatise the Hortensius: ‘this book quite altered my affections, turned my prayers to thyself, O Lord.’1 At that decisive moment of transition from the ancient to the medieval world the Fathers kept alive, and transmitted, the classical philosophy that they had learnt from Cicero: whose works thus became an important ingredient in Christian doctrine and scholastic logic.
Pope Gregory the Great, however, wanted to destroy his writings, since they diverted men’s attention from the Scriptures. This heralded a period, during the last half of the first millennium A.D., when though exceptions occur there was a partial eclipse of Cicero’s influence. From the eleventh century onwards, however, it rose again steadily. His idealized Republic, good sense, public spirit, and portrayal of a civilized community appealed to the rising urban peoples of me later Middle Ages -merchants, professional men, administrators in their struggles for an independent, stable, and rational life. On Duties, almost as much as Augustine’s City of God, now figured as a support for the Christian Faith and a guide for the development of the western mind. More and more readers felt profoundly attracted to Cicero, first as a writer of popular stories and anecdotes, and secondly as the plain man’s interpreter of ancient thought: and medieval and modern philosophy owe him a great amount of its terminology. When schools grew in size and scope in the twelfth century, and systematic rhetoric was increasingly taught, a juvenile work by Cicero on rhetoric, On Invention, occupied a dominant place in education.1 John of Salisbury, whose favourite Latin author he was, declared that Cicero would have been one of the greatest of the great, if his conduct had not fallen short of his wisdom. The typical medieval Cicero had formerly been the teacher of a flight from the active life, but now, when civic responsibility was again beginning to play a part in literary culture, St Thomas Aquinas could point to the Cicero of On Duties as sole champion of a life of activity.
By c. 1290 Italian versions of certain of his speeches had begun to appear, but his essays On Old Age and On Friendship were what contributed most largely to his reputation as a good, wise man. The same two works were likewise the chief Latin sources of the most important of love romances, the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose. This begins, however, with an allusion to the Dream of Scipio in Cicero’s treatise On the State – a Platonic revelation of immortality well-known to medieval writers from Boethius to Chaucer, who founded upon it his Parliament of Fowls; Cicero’s Scipio Africanus became a hero to the later Middle Ages. Henry de Bracton, author of the first comprehensive treatise on English law, relied on principles derived, through Papinian, from Cicero’s definitions of Natural Law. Dante described On Friendship as his chief philosophical guide, and the classification of sins in the Inferno (Canto XI) is based upon a passage of On Duties.
The astonishing outburst of creative vitality which dazzled the eye in the fifteenth-century Italian city-states was believed by the Italians themselves to be a rebirth, a Renaissance, of classical antiquity. Although there were no complete precedents for their own progressive vigour and feeling for abstract order, they found in the ancient classics many things which helped to stimulate their colourful and ebullient civilization: a sense of style and harmony, an individualistic belief in human achievements and potentialities (within the framework of the divine plan), a desire to be rational. One of the very strongest forces contributing to this Renaissance ideal, and through it to the whole intellectual, scientific, and social development of Western Europe, was the character of Cicero as interpreted by Petrarch. Though he was fired by him because of what was already existent in his own mind, the novel element in Petrarch’s humanism2 was his devoted determination to use Cicero as his guide in interpreting the present through the past: Cicero as the paragon of eloquence, the writer on friendship and civilized leisure, the delineator of an idealized Roman way of life, and, in particular, the stimulating thinker on moral questions – for Petrarch, though like later Italian humanists a devout Christian, preferred ethics to theology, and felt that salvation must come through right conduct. In this sphere – he believed – as in eloquence, Cicero was superior to Aristotle (now reaching the climax of his dominance in Italy), on the grounds that the latter, though more skilled in defining virtue, was less effective in urging its cultivation. Led by Petrarch, then, the Renaissance became, above all else, a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of classical antiquity.
After becoming devoted to Cicero (as well as to Virgil) as a young man, in 1333 Petrarch with much excitement read and transcribed two speeches which he had come upon at Liege, inaugurating a series of such ‘discoveries’ which added, dramatically rather than substantially, to the corpus of continuously inherited works. Then, in 1345 (two years after the establishment at Bologna of a Lecturership in Cicero and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Petrarch rediscovered, in a library at Verona, Cicero’s letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus – with their self-revelations of their writer’s political life. These at first came as a shock to him. Cicero’s reappearance from philosophical retirement in order to resist Antony seemed madly rash to Petrarch who, although exalting - against medieval renunciations of this life – the desirability of renown (Jama) won by inborn merit (virtus), himself lived in exile at Italian courts and as’ the hermit of Vaucluse’, and was divorced from the public life of his native Florence.
The next generation of Italians, on the other hand, found this same patriotic responsibility of Cicero the fulfilment, not the negation, of his moral teaching: Cicero’s experiences and arguments, between them, had laid the foundation for an age-long analysis of the conflicts between freedom and despotism. Florence was one of the last Italian city-states to remain free of dictatorial rule; and its Chancellor, Coluccio Salutati, who identified at Verona (and claimed to have learnt political lessons from) a manuscript of the Letters to Friends (1390), as well as Leonardo Bruni, professor at the same city and one of the founders of modern historiography, resembled Machiavelli and Guicciardini a century later in seeing their city as the heir to the Roman Republic and champion of individual liberties: a fact to which they attributed her cultural preeminence.
Cicero’s ideal of the whole man, combining mastery of language (including invective) with a sense of public responsibility and a cultivated employment of leisure, humanized philosophical studies and also became the basic education of the Renaissance upper class, through the colleges of Guarino at Ferrara1 and Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua. The former resembled a University department, but in the latter, with its pupils (drawn from a variety of classes) for whom knowledge of Cicero was the avenue to a political or diplomatic career, the roots of the English public-school system can be discerned.
In 1418 the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini, himself a discoverer of manuscripts, visited England for four not very productive years. The great patron of letters Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who possessed and presented to Oxford an influential library, unavailingly invited Bruni to England (c. 1433), where he enjoyed a high reputation as translator of Aristotle. In common with other Englishmen, Duke Humphrey also admired Guarino. The latter’s pupils at Ferrara included William Grey (c. 1445–6), the later Bishop of Ely, in whose palatial library (as in Duke Humphrey’s) Cicero occupied the main place; Grey’s protégé John Free of Balliol, the leading fifteenth-century English humanist, who attributed his literary inspiration to Guarino’s lectures on Cicero; Robert Flemmyng, who while at Padua had already transcribed On Duties, and John Tiptoft Earl of Worcester, the princely translator of On Friendship. Then Thomas Chaundler, pioneer of humanism at Oxford, was a fervent admirer of Cicero, from whose treatise On Duties he frequently quoted.2
Cicero’s overwhelming reputation in the later fifteenth century is also illustrated by the early history of printing. Within the very first year in which classical books were printed (1465), On Duties was published twice, at Subiaco and at Mainz – the latter edition being the first book to print Greek works in Greek type – and Subiaco in the same year also published Cicero’s treatise On the Orator, of which a manuscript had come to light fifty-four years previously. Before the end of the century, printers in Italy had produced more than 200 editions of Cicero. In 1481 Caxton published an English translation, from a French rendering, of On Old Age – very popular again in this and the next century – and also a version of On Friendship. This was an age of translation: the Renaissance view was that if great thoughts can be communicated – across whatever obstacles and difficulties – they will produce great thoughts. Yet Latin, untranslated, was the language of royal courts, chanceries, embassies, churches, and universities; its model was Cicero, and controversy raged concerning the desirability, or otherwise, of achieving an exact copy of his style.
The sixteenth century was the time when these influences spread massively northwards from Italy, to which royal courts elsewhere owed so much of their style, culture, and self-will. Between 1553 and 1610 there were sixty-three editions of Ort Duties, a figure equalled by no other book. To Erasmus this work seemed to embody every principle needed by a youth undertaking a public career; in spite of his Ciceronitmus satirizing too pedantic an imitation of the model, he was more devoted to Cicero than to any other writer, and owed him much of his skill as a storyteller. Erasmus praised him for bringing philosophy within reach of the common man, and declared his moral doctrines to be more truly Christian than many discussions by theologians and monks. Martin Luther regarded his treatises as superior to Aristode’s, and Melanchdion described On Duties as a work of perfection; while another product of the Reformation, Polish Socinianism, was directly derived from Cicero. This favour was reflected in Protestant teaching programmes; yet On Old Age and On Friendship remained equally prominent in the curricula of Jesuit colleges. Montaigne, though he complained of verbosity in the philosophical essays, quoted Cicero 312 times, loved his eloquence and his letters, admired On Old Age, and derived from On Duties much of his emphasis on discovering and remaining true to one’s own self. At the age of sixteen, Queen Elizabeth I had read nearly all the works of Cicero, of whose style her tutor Roger Ascham, like the preacher Richard Hooker, was a master.
Yet the most truly Ciceronian phase in England is not the Elizabethan but the Jacobean age; the increased efficiency of classical learning led to a more understanding admiration of Cicero’s complex style. The dedication introducing the Authorized Version of the Bible is directly based upon his rhythms. Milton, whose prose is as deeply pervaded by Latin-ity as his poems, was another master of his rolling periods; though his own structure was looser, as befitted the far less inflected English language.
Edward Herbert, John Locke, and Bossuet owe a very great deal to Cicero’s writings. ‘A beautiful soul always,’ said Montesquieu of him, ‘when it was not weak.’ Humanists, deists, believers in natural religion, rationalists, free-thinkers – all turned to his essay On the Nature of the Gods. ‘I desire,’ wrote David Hume, ‘to take my Catalogue of Virtues from Cicero’s Offices (On Duties), not from the Whole Duty of Man.’1 Diderot was another admirer, and so was Voltaire. He praised On Divination for its attacks on superstition, declaring that ‘Cicero taught us to think’, especially in On Duties (p. 157); while his associate Frederick the Great, claiming ‘infatuation’ for Cicero – whose works he took on his campaigns – proclaimed the same treatise to be the best book on morals that had been or could ever be written.
Perhaps the periodic structure of Cicero’s style is best reproduced in the eighteenth-century abundance of Samuel Johnson, William Robertson, and Edward Gibbon, who praised the orator’s language as well as his freedom-loving spirit and ‘admirable lessons’, with their enlightenment concerning’ the public and private sense of a man’. The adaptation of forensic prose to Ciceronian rhetoric is illustrated by Burke: when Johnson was asked by Boswell if he thought Burke had read much Cicero he was wrong to answer ‘I don’t believe it, Sir’, since Burke, whose attack on Warren Hastings explicitly refers to the Verrines, owes much of his balance, symmetry, and resonance to Ciceronian oratory. Chatham, Sheridan, and Fox again all echo in varying degrees the same elaborate rhythms; and the younger Pitt developed his oratorical powers through methodical exercises in translating them. Through the agency of such men Cicero’s influence was stimulated in England by the House of Commons debates, as well as by the growth of trial by jury.
Kant, the youthful Schiller, and Herbart were all influenced by On Duties. John Adams, quoting Cicero extensively in his Preface on Government (1786), observed that ‘all ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher combined’; and Thomas Jefferson, though critical of Cicero’s political life, infused the American Declaration of Independence with his Natural Law and ‘unalienable’ rights of man, and filled his own commonplace book with references to the Tusculan Disputations2 Meanwhile Cicero, long the model of spiritual dissatisfactions as well as of the ‘establishment’, was ever in the minds of young Frenchmen fired by the Revolution: Camille Desmoulins described On Duties as a masterpiece of common sense, Mirabeau based one of his speeches upon three of Cicero’s, and the Girondin Louvet drew upon the orations Against Catiline for his speech against Robes- pierre, whose reply, based on the speech For Sulla, earned him the accusation of comparing himself to Cicero.
Among those born at the turn of the next century Cicero still had powerful, though critical, supporters. Macaulay, though he deplored his ‘girlish vanity’ and egotism and accused the panegyrist Middleton of ‘composing a lying legend in honour of St Tully’, particularly admired On Duties – recommending his nephew Sir G. O. Trevelyan to read it while attending mathematics lectures. Cicero’s cadences could still be detected in the speeches of Gladstone and – whether he knew it or not -Abraham Lincoln. Cardinal Newman regarded Cicero as irresolute and inconstant, but admired his campaign against Catiline: ‘other writers,’ he concluded, ‘write Latin. Cicero writes Roman.’
During the nineteenth century, a good deal of his influence is still apparent in the patriotic nationalism of Germans, the public-school morality of the English, the taste for rhetoric among the French. Yet the survival, in this way, of individual elements in his many-sided personality was now often accompanied by unprecedentedly sharp critical reactions. Drumann, in praise of monarchy, had attacked his Republican politics with what was described as ‘inquisitorial harshness, finical casuistry, and brutal inconsiderateness’. Then Theodor Mommsen, another admirer of Hohenzollern Caesarism, again deplored Cicero’s Republicanism, and with it by implication not only the Junker aristocracy against whom his own assault was primarily directed but also the whole very different liberal tradition of European humanism which Cicero had so largely created – a significant development in the rise of imperial Germany. In England, J. A. Froude agreed with Mommsen, and Dean Merivale’s damping epithets for Cicero are ‘discreet and decorous’. While, as a whole versatile man, his merits far outweigh his defects, an age of specialization was bound to find fault individually with each of his various activities.
Since then Cicero’s reputation has been lower than ever before. In particular, those who associate classical studies with the now suspect the culture of the nineteenth century are inclined to misinterpret the practical, moral stimulus of his humanitas as the mere social elegance of an effete ruling clique, and so to underestimate the authentic belief in human brotherhood from which his hatred of men like Verres and Antony stemmed. Moreover, irreligious and religious people alike are discontented with his non-dogmatic attitude to divine intervention, misunderstanding his philosophical standpoint (p. 13); the former think he only dragged in Providence for the sake of conformity, whereas the latter, ignoring his traditional stimulus to the churches, are inclined to misconceive (as the Renaissance did not) his humanism as the atheism for which nowadays this word popularly stands.
Moreover, although during the present century a sharpening dislike of Caesarism in many quarters removed one of the chief reasons for attacking Cicero, his political compromises have, in the darkening political scene, continued to cause irritation. So, upon the same suspicion of insincerity, has his rhetoric, from which J. K. Huysmans sought to lead the readers of À Rebours (1891) towards the un-classical charms of later Latin. School-teachers have not, in general, followed his lead, but their persistence with Cicero has somehow lacked conviction, and in recent years, despite successes with other authors, they have largely failed to commend Cicero to their charges. Partly as a result, contemporary thought, literature, and criticism, even when they are aware of other classical writers, take little account of him. The year 1958, therefore, was the first of twenty centenaries of his death in which relatively few educated people concerned themselves with this absorbingly significant builder of western civilization – significant to its past history, and highly relevant also to the problems which it faces today.
The following modern works may be found useful:
A. E. DOUGLAS, Cicero (‘Greece and Rome’: New Surveys in the Classics, no. 2), Oxford, 1968
M. GELZER, Cicero, Blackwell, 1973
M. GRIFFIN in J. BOARDMAN (ed.), Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford University Press, 1986
P. GRIMAL, Cicéron, Paris, 1984
T. N. MITCHELL, Cicero: The Ascending Years, Yale University Press, 1979
E. RAWSON, Cicero: A Portrait, Allen Lane, 1975
E. RAWSON in T.J. LUCE (ed.), Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, New York, 1982
D. R. SHACKLETON BAILEY, Cicero, Duckwordi, 1971
L. P. WILKINSON in E. J. KENNEY and W. V. CLAYSEN (eds.), Cambridge History of Classical Literature, II, Cambridge University Press, 1982
T. P. WISEMAN, Roman Political Life go B.C.–A.D. 6g, University of Exeter, 1985