The late philosophy of Cicero's dialogues of 46–44 b.c. is generally taken to be articulated from a stance of Academic scepticism. That is the way Cicero frequently represents his standpoint in these works, especially but not only in his authorial prefaces, including those to De officiis, his last contribution to philosophy, not a dialogue but an extended letter of advice, cast in a Stoic mould. For A. such professions are the utterances of a constructed persona, ‘Cicero’ (as it might better have been written in the subtitle), concealing views of Cicero's own as a magnus opinator, to which ‘Cicero’ alludes from time to time but which he never discloses. The Revival of Platonism is offered as an exploration of what we should suppose to be their key themes.
In an article published 50 years ago (‘Cicero als Platoniker und Skeptiker’, Gymnasium 72 [1965]), W. Burkert found it intriguing that Cicero never refers to the simile of the Cave, constituting as it does what one might be inclined to take to be a central document of Platonic philosophy. In A.’s view the Cave – more particularly the philosopher's descent to the Cave – is no less central in Cicero's own Platonist philosophy. Indeed, because Cicero was prepared to descend to a degree that Plato was not, he surpasses Plato as a philosopher: his own practice of the philosophical life was conducted through political engagement in Rome, except when silenced by Caesar's dictatorship. Furthermore, Plato for Cicero was master of speaking as well as of understanding. But A.’s Cicero knows that, to be effective in the Cave, he must be as he became a greater orator than Plato. And inspired by the memory of his daughter Tullia's example, he knows too that a society needs not just masculine virtus but a more ‘womanly’ humanitas, too: ‘altruism's maternal matrix’, its identification being ‘his greatest contribution to Platonism’ (p. xxiv).
Nonetheless (A. argues) it was understandable that Cicero should choose in his later philosophical writings to present himself as a mere Academic. He was following the practice of inconclusive discussion characteristic of Plato's own dialogues – what in the Orator he called the mode of multiplicium variorumque sermonum (Orat. 12; rendered by A. as ‘many-leveled and conflicting dialogues’, p. 95). However – A. thinks – we should not be deceived. ‘Cicero’ in the Academica is made to indicate the self-contradiction at the core of Academic philosophising: he ‘uncritically endorses’ the self-contradiction of Socrates’ scire se nihil se scire (p. 92). In subsequent dialogues, which in effect constitute a critique of Stoic ethics, Cicero indicates the unattainability of a definition of the human end (Fin.) and that prime need for womanly humanitas (Tusc.: although on A.’s own showing most references to women or the womanly there are distinctly unflattering). Likewise the trilogy of dialogues initiated by De natura deorum target principally the inadequacies of Stoicism, while De senectute and De amicitia exhibit philosophy as the Socratic practice of death. In De officiis – whose real addressee is Octavian – there can be a return to a timely political philosophy Platonically conceived. The book closes with chapters on Brutus, interpreted as a Platonic funeral oration for Hortensius and the Roman Republic, and Orator, construed as a sort of apologia pro vita sua. Here the ideal orator is portrayed, A. suggests, as a synthesis of Demosthenes and Plato: the key to Cicero's self-understanding.
This is a book fizzing with energy, and full of learning of many sorts, from which any discriminating reader stands to gain. As will already be evident, it is also highly and often idiosyncratically opinionated, and of course designed to upset plenty of scholarly apple carts. Among leading contemporary writers on Stoicism, the sceptical Academy and Cicero's philosophica with whom the author takes vigorous issue are Burnyeat, Frede and Bobzien, not to mention the serried ranks of ‘Owenites, the scholars of Tübingen, and the school of Leo Strauss’ (p. xxix). On the other hand appreciation is expressed for the labours of many others, including R. Woolf, your reviewer and especially C. Lévy.
The difference in perspective that A. brings I found on the larger scale refreshing if not convincing. Overall – leaving aside detail – there seems to me a considerable strength but also one particularly damaging weakness in his approach to Cicero. The weakness is methodological. A. speaks at one juncture of the bifurcation of Cicero's authorial voice (p. 159). He has in mind a passage such as Tusc. 5.11, where Cicero describes himself as endeavouring in Socratic style to conceal his own sententia, relieve others from error and search out quid esset simillimum veri. For A. the sententia is Cicero's own (for which he would have claimed a Platonic certainty), but the project of concealing that and debating the simillimum veri that of the constructed character ‘Cicero’, or rather in Tusc. ‘M’, oddly described as a Stoic (p. 139). But claiming Platonic certainty would not be Socratic in the least. In the Academica (2.66) Cicero has already told us why he holds philosophical opinions: he is not a sapiens (with an assured grasp of truth), and hence he is inevitably liable to entertain possibly false opinions – which is presumably one reason for enquirers to attach no authority to them (ND 1.10), but (as at Tusc. 5.11) to knuckle down to arguing out pros and cons.
In other words, it is one and the same Cicero who has the sententia he conceals and who thinks it better and certainly more helpful to others to practice Academic scepticism. It is not that making a distinction between Cicero and ‘Cicero’ is never an apposite move for the dialogues’ readers, but (as A. himself observes somewhere) it is tricky to handle. Thus ‘M’ is obviously a Ciceronian construction, but equally ‘A’ is made to construe him as at once the author and the principal speaker of the anti-Stoic Book 4 of De finibus (Tusc. 5.32), an identification from which ‘M’ does not demur (ibid. 33).
Quintilian's expression Platonis aemulus (Inst. 10.1.123), however, which A. reproduces in his subtitle, indicates something salutary in his treatment of the writings of 46–44 b.c. There is no question that in the dialogues of the earlier sequence, composed in the later 50s b.c., Cicero was not only intent on imitating and rivalling Plato's writing, but intensely preoccupied with the philosopher himself, as the correspondence from the period further confirms (see S. McConnell, Philosophical Life in Cicero's Letters [2014]). Platonic strains and moments in the later sequence are more occasional and mostly less emphatic. But A. rightly stresses that in his account of his philosophical œuvre in Div. 2 Cicero includes works from both sequences cheek by jowl, all as contributions to the same enterprise: philosophy. The Revival of Platonism prompts us to consider the possibility that a single overarching conception of philosophy is in play throughout and that it is in some sense a Platonic conception. After all, between the thoroughly Academic Nat. D. and Div. came De senectute, a dialogue that like the subsequent De amicitia situates itself in the same ambience as De republica. How radically abrupt is the shift in philosophical outlook from its immediate predecessor and successor that its composition represents? Asking such questions need not commit us to A.’s kind of answer. But it might prevent us prematurely putting the two sequences of Ciceronian writings into two mutually insulated compartments.
It remains to add that the book is generously indexed, with coverage of verba and loci as well as names and topics. There is a rich bibliography.
