Cicero's Intellectual Transformation after the Death of Tullia

About a generation after Cicero's death, Pliny the Elder quoted a comment from Caesar about Cicero. Caesar had enlarged and secured the boundaries of the Roman state over several decades. Pliny attibutes this line to Caesar--about Cicero:

"How far greater and more glorious to have enlarged so immeasurably the limits of the Roman mind than the boundaries of their empire," quoted in Haskell, This Was Cicero, 255.

In fact, what is most evident from a study of the last five or so years of Cicero's life (he died in Dec. 43 BCE) is the way that his acquaintance with grief, grief at the loss of his only daughter Tullia in Feb. 45, transformed the way he looked at his scholarship and contribution to Roman letters. Rather than simply continuing with his writing work, which had occupied him almost non-stop since the beginning of 46 BCE, he shifted from what you might call "professional" writing to writing that was personal, dramatically hortatory and philosophical.

As a result of his further personal deepening at the loss of his daughter, we now have a Latin philosophical corpus which not only "translates" Greek concepts into Latin, but brings the Greek world of philosophy into Latin speech in such a profoundly Roman way. People before Cicero's time felt that Greek philosophy was invariably tied up with its "Greekness;" what Cicero demonstrated was that just as Latin literature could strike out on its own while being inspired by Greek originals, so Latin philosophy could have a similar space in which to operate.

In order to demonstrate this claim--of the transformation of Cicero's mind, you we need to know the following:

Literary Output Before Tullia's Death on Feb. 15, 45 BCE

Cicero began to write in earnest when it gradually dawned on him late in 47/early in 46 that Caesar wouldn't be leaning on him for a lot of help at Rome. Indeed, Caesar was scarcely at home, since battles at Thapsus (April 46) and Munda (March 45) kept him occupied. Before Tullia's death Cicero "fine tuned" his oratorical writings, as well as wrote a light work, not fully extant, on stoic paradoxes. But his literary output in this year or so was impressive. Here are his works:

1. Brutus-- a dialogue on the history of rhetoric in Rome.
2. Oratore-- a rhetorical treatise on elocutio--the doctrine of the modes of expression. He quotes from many speeches to illustrate his stylistic points.
3. De Optimo Genere Oratorum-- a short work, only partially surviving, which served as an introduction to two of Demosthenes' speeches.
4. & 5. Pro Ligario; Pro Marcello--two speeches given to assist Roman citizens, who had supported Pompey, in regaining some of their lost status after Pharsalus.
6. Paradoxa Stoicorum-- a work probably written hastily by Cicero in which he presents Stoic philosophical paradoxes not in the traditional form of dialectical argument but in the form of rhetorical commonplaces.

Then, Tullia Dies--Feb. 15, 45 BCE

When he returns to his writing after Tullia's death, he not only becomes, if anything, more prolific, but the scope of his interests is more personal and philosophical. The remainder of this essay and the next essay will just list these works, with a few comments on the lesser-known of them. You can quickly tell that if you want to understand Cicero, you have lots of work to do.

Let's begin with a general statement of what Cicero saw that he was "up to" in this period:

"Nunc vero et fortunae gravissimo percussus vulnere et administratione rei publicae liberatus doloris medicinam a philosophia peto..."

"Now that I have been struck by the most heavy wound of fortune and am freed from the administratioin of the state, I seek a medicine for my pain in philosophy..."

1. Consolatio--this is a work which only survives in fragments, in which he deals with his own grief and the whole subject of comfort in loss. There was a genre of "consolatory" literature in antiquity, and Cicero's probably was quite dependent on that literature in writing his work. I took a detour to read reviews of an elaborate and ingenious attempt to reconstruct this text by Jacob van Wageningen, De Ciceronis Libro Consolationis (1916), and am impressed by how much energy sometimes goes into solving puzzles whose solution evades our abilities. Wageningen argues that lying behind Cicero's work is Crantor's Peri Penthous (Latin De luctu). Panaetius, the leading philosopher of the 2nd Century BCE Stoics, said that Crantor's work was so moving that people should memorize it word by word. As Haskell argues, Cicero's major motivation in writing this book was to convince himself that "the soul reveals capabilities that imply eternal existence," (p. 251). As a result of this work, Cicero concluded that what his daughter needed was not so much a tomb as a shrine--to a young woman enthroned now with the immortals.
2. Hortensius--this work has likewise been substantially lost, but is an example of the genre known as "protreptic" (hortatory) literature in antiquity. This admonitory tract, a dialogue between Hortensius and Cicero, urges the reader to take up philosophy as the most fulfilling guide to human life. Such a tract would function similarly to a "Come to Christ" sermon of a 21st century Evangelist. In scattered quotations that come down to us from Lactantius and Augustine, we learn that Hortensius took the position that philosophy is absolutely worthless, while Cicero explained that it is in fact more necessary to human happiness than anything else. Happiness, in fact, depends on the insights that philosophy offers (Fuhrmann, Cicero and the Roman Republic, 158). So profound was the impact of this work that the great 4th-5th century Christian Father Augustine tells us that it brought about his 'conversion' to philosophy from the life lived in celebration of the flesh (Confessions 3.7-8).

Conclusion

We are just starting to probe the nature of Cicero's intellectual transformation after his daughter's death. The next essay will tell the rest of the story.

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