Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Hello, welcome back to the On Duties podcast where we're reading through all of De Officiis by Cicero with the scholars of the Ciceronian Society. I'm Chris Anadale and joining me today are my co hosts Ethan Alexander Davy, Katherine Bradshaw and Ben Peterson. We are coming up on the end of book one of the of On Duty dealing with the Honorable. Book two will be about the beneficial. We'll come to that in several weeks. But right now we're going to turn to Cicero's discussion of our obligations to society. They need to show a certain amount of respect for social graces and social expectations, and to reject the advice of the cynics.
So we're going to begin with book one, chapters 148 and 149 together. Ethan, may I ask you to read those and Catherine, you take lead off. Comment.
[00:01:03] Speaker C: We need give no advice about things done in accordance with custom and civic codes of behavior, as they themselves constitute pieces of advice.
No one should be led into the error of thinking that because Socrates or Aristippus did or said something contrary to custom and civic practice, that is something he may huge, that is something he may do himself, for those men acquired such freedom on account of great indeed divine goodness. But the reasoning of the Cynics must be entirely rejected, for it is hostile to a sense of shame, and without that nothing can be upright and nothing honorable.
Furthermore, we ought to respect and revere those whose life has been conspicuous for its great and honorable deeds, who have held sound views about the Republic, and have deserved or still deserve well of her, just as if they had achieved a specific honor or command. We ought also to grant a great deal to old age, to yield to those who exercise magistracies, and to discriminate between citizen and foreigner, and in the case of a foreigner as to whether he has come in a private or a public capacity. In short, so as not to go into details, we ought to revere, to guard, and to preserve the common affection and fellowship of the whole of humankind.
[00:02:29] Speaker D: Well, the discussion of respecting the civic mores, the customs, is wonderful in the sense of Cicero saying just because Socrates did something, or just because this great man did something, does not necessarily mean that you should.
There's a recognition again, we've just come off the discussion of seemliness recently.
There's a realization and a self awareness of I am not Socrates and therefore I am not qualified to go against many of the social conventions because I have not achieved the standing through virtue. Because Cicero says that these men were able to flout custom because they were virtuous. It was not because they were trying to get a rise out of people. It was that they had achieved the kind of character that rises above mere social convention, and that is what earned them the right to. If we have not achieved that level of virtue, then we have not earned the right to either, unless the convention is vicious, in which case it's a completely different area, as we've seen in earlier sections.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's an interesting point here that there is a kind of deference that we ought to give to the mores, as Catherine was saying. And it may be that there are people who are. Who have achieved a kind of wisdom, a kind of ability to stand apart from society and evaluate it according to true standards. Right. According to what is actually just and beautiful and good. But that is not something that. That's a weighty thing to do, right? To say, hey, all of the civic codes that we've had in our customs and all of these things, those are not to be taken seriously. This other way of living is better. Right. That's a weighty thing to.
I think that's right. He does preserve the possibility that there may be times for that. But as a sort of. There's a rebuttable presumption to use kind of legal language. I know he's not using that here, but in legal language, there's a rebuttable presumption of the justice and the goodness of civic mores and codes of behavior. That was interesting that he says at the very beginning, they constitute a kind of advice in themselves.
It's a kind of, hey, people have learned ways of living together that.
That recommend themselves to us and we ought to take them seriously.
[00:05:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Ben, that struck me as well that I'm not going to give you advice to follow the advice of custom because custom is the advice. Why do you need to be told two times?
We might say tradition and custom in this way is the record of what works. It's what has worked for people and what's been codified in common practice. So do what common practice advises, again with a sort of rebuttable presumption.
My thought, Catherine, similar to yours, that there's a kind of quad licet Jovi here about virtue, right? What is permitted to the man of superlative virtue is not permitted to everybody. You have to earn the right to be Socrates, to flout convention or to break it for some specific purpose, no doubt connected with some virtuous project.
But if we mere mortals, or Marcus, to whom this is addressed, well, follow the normal rule of things.
And it's paired in chapter 149 with this advice to revere and respect people who have been conspicuous in their virtue.
That's, you know, it seems almost too obvious to need saying, but where we're sort of coming to the wrap up advice. Well, yes, obviously, seek out, imitate, admire, respect, revere and praise good people. And that's how you, you know, win and become worthy in some sense of the affection of mankind.
[00:06:37] Speaker C: Ethan, I'm not sure there's much more for me to say. But yeah, I would certainly agree with everything that you've all said. And although the last point about the importance of respecting and revering those who have been conspicuous for their great deeds, of course that seems obvious, but it's also something that our own society today seems to have difficulty with about whether we can raise anyone up and honor them for their deeds. But. Right, it seems like that ought to be obvious advice.
When he says in the first paragraph, again, you've all covered it perfectly. But I'll add one other analogy. Sometimes I have a student who likes to be very creative with his language in a paper, and my response to that student is often, are you Shakespeare? Right. Shakespeare was such a genius of a wordsmith that he could coin new words. But if you're not that genius, or if you have not yet mastered the ability to follow the conventions of our language, then you should learn that first and only then are you perhaps in a position to make new coinages. So it's the same thing with civic codes and custom. First show that you've mastered the advice that society has given you, and then you might be in a position to challenge us in other ways.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Very good, very good. Thank you.
I'll add here just as a post privilege, I certainly have encountered this in the genre of poetry composition. If you look at any very good poet, look at their collected poems, you'll find the first pages of the volume are always formal exercises, sonnets, villanelles, highly structured formal poetry that they have to master and do excellently and well before they can begin breaking off into whatever patterns of free verse or whatever different style that they would like to pursue in creative writing. So that certainly is the case in some of the areas that I'm familiar with.
Our next chapter will be 150. Catherine, would you please read that? And Ben, lead off.
[00:08:57] Speaker D: Certainly.
Now, as for crafts and other means of livelihood, the following is roughly what we have been told as to which should be thought fit for a free man and which demeaning. First, those means of livelihood that incur the dislike of other men are not approved, for example, collecting harbor dues or usury.
Again, all those workers who are paid for their labor and not for their skill have servile and demeaning employment. For in their case, the very wage is a contract of servitude. Those who buy from merchants and sell again immediately should also be thought of as demeaning themselves, for they would make no profit unless they told sufficient lies. And nothing is more dishonorable than falsehood. All handcraftsmen are engaged in a demeaning trade, for there can be nothing well bred about the workshop. The crafts are the least worthy of approval.
The crafts that are least worthy of approval are those that minister to the pleasures. Fishmongers, butchers, cooks, poulterers, fishermen, as Terence puts it. Add to this, if you like perfumers, dancers, and the whole variety show.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Well, this is one of those passages that might strike moderns or postmoderns kind of negatively on first reading. Right.
You know, I almost feel like we spend a lot of time trying to send the opposite message. Right. All work is honorable. If you're working in honest days, you know, work, that's a great thing. You're putting food on the table for your family. Right. And, you know, that. That we could maybe try to trace where that idea comes from. I think it probably does have something to do with Christian teaching. But, you know, traditionally, our Lord was a carpenter. Right. And so that would be one of these demeaning kinds of work. But it is striking here. So I wonder if we, you know. But it's worth trying to figure out. Okay. There are certain trades that are sort of suited to the free person, the free man, and then there are some trades that are more servile. And maybe we might try to map this onto Aristotle's idea of sort of labor versus action. Right. The person of action, the person who makes choices, who is deliberating, who is engaging in virtuous action, which is based on the will. Right. Aligning the will with reason and all these things versus the person who is sort of just carrying out a function. Right. Or the function isn't everyone's carrying out a function, but a function that is someone else's. Right. It is useful to somebody else for somebody else's purpose. Right. So I wonder if that might be part of what's going on here, in addition to the point about merchants being necessarily dishonest when they trade goods from one to the other.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah. I think to extend what you've said, Ben, I thought, of course, this seems quite at odds with modern assumptions about economy and also about the dignity of work and of the way the spiritual life maps onto the material life. But trying to think sympathetically with Cicero here, I'm struck by the fact that part of what he's talking about, of course, is what kind of occupation is fitting for a free person, for a person of leisure, right and meaning here, leisure in the highest sense. A person who aspires to be the best of humanity.
And there are some professions which are suitable and some which are not. We'll go on in the next chapter to talk a little bit more about this same subject.
But he begins by saying some things are demeaning, and first among those are occupations which inspire the dislike of other people, like usury and collecting, harbor dues.
These things are unworthy. And I think part of what makes them unworthy is that by doing them, you displease and sort of discomfort your fellow man. And this goes against the sort of office of the gentleman, which is to be, in a sense, pleasing, but morally pleasing, sort of inspiring to his fellow citizens. And I would contrast that with the sort of turn at the end of this chapter where he says, the crafts that are least worthy of approval, that are least suitable, again, to the kind of excellent person we're imagining here are ones that minister to the pleasures and here think to the pleasures of the flesh. People who prepare food, the fishmongers, the butchers, the cooks, et cetera.
Well, those things must be done. But they are perhaps least fitting for a kind of morally exemplary person, a person who seeks to please not the physical senses, but maybe the moral sensibilities and the sort of spiritual life of the city. So that's what I have on this somewhat difficult chapter. Ethan, what are your thoughts?
[00:13:45] Speaker C: Right. I think all of that's fair.
So we should be thinking about this passage in terms of the role of someone like Cicero himself, or again, Aristotle was mentioned. Another important reference point here would be Xenophon, Xenophon's Economicus, where he makes very similar distinctions about different sorts of trades and free and servile labor, that there are some kinds of occupations that are consistent with the life of a man of virtue who is going to be engaged in politics, in serving his country.
And there are these other trades that are not consistent with that way of life. And I think we'll see when we eventually get to the end of book two.
Cicero will single out usury and banking and that sort of. That sort of endeavor. As the most dishonorable of all of the different activities. And so it's something that is, yes, it's displeasing to others to be a tax collector and to come and collect dues for them, but what is that person actually doing for his labor other than holding out his hand? Right.
And the very idea of usury, of earning money without labor. So there are trades that are dishonorable in themselves and also that are not consistent with the life of virtue and public service which the members of the patrician class and free Romans were supposed to be able to engage in.
[00:15:38] Speaker D: You all have covered this chapter wonderfully. I will only add, I think there is an interesting distinction that Cicero makes between the men who are paid for their manual labor as opposed to their artistic skill, when he says all those workers who are paid for their labor and not for their skill have servile and demeaning employment.
So there is a distinction that Cicero makes between it's not that everything that is done with one's hands is necessarily less honourable. It's that there has to be an element of skill, of training, of ability involved in order to raise it in his mind and in the general Roman mind publicly, as opposed to something that anyone can do. It's just, is he willing to do it?
So there's a difference between, say, a goldsmith who does very intricate fine work and a stonemason. For Cicero, that's just doing the very rudimentary carving, not the ones that are doing the fine, putting the stones together.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: That's very good. Thank you, Catherine. And I'll just add, I forgot to mention this, of course, for Christians, many might recognize that servile labor is just that category of labor which one is obligated not to perform on the Sabbath. So we may have something, a similar sort of distinction in mind, some of us, in terms of thinking through Sunday obligation.
The next chapter is 151. I may ask you, Ben, to read that, and I'll lead off comment.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Certainly other arts require greater good sense or else procure substantial benefit, for example, medicine, architecture, or teaching things that are honorable, they're honorable for those who belong to the class that they befit.
Trade, if it is on a small scale, should be considered demeaning. If, however, men trade on a large and expansive scale, importing many things from all over and distributing them to many people without misrepresentation, that is not entirely to be criticized. Indeed, if ever such men are satiated or rather satisfied with what they have gained, and just as they have often left the High seas for the harbor, now leave the harbor itself for land in the country. It seems that we have every right to praise their occupation. However, there is no kind of gainful employment that is better, more fruitful, more pleasant, and more worthy of a free man than agriculture. As I have said plenty about this in my book, the elder Cato, you may find there everything relevant to the subject.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Okay, thank you.
I'd just comment here. This looks like an issue. Perhaps some of you could address it of scale. Right. If one conducts trade for pennies, just sort of penny any trade. Well, this does seem to be unworthy and demeaning. However, if one is a big tradesman of the right kind, one might earn a certain kind of respect for it.
And similarly, the footnote here notes that Cicero is not thinking of the small farmer working his own backyard garden or a small plot, but a large landowner who doesn't so much get his hands dirty as sort of supervise the agriculture, perhaps. That footnote, if I'm reading it correctly, gives some indication of just what Cicero is praising here when he praises agriculture or that type of wealth production and management.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Ethan.
[00:19:23] Speaker C: Yes, this is another one of those passages that tells us about the perspective of the patrician, of the gentleman. Right. So the most honorable occupation for a free man is agriculture. Being a landowner. It's as a landowner that you're not only acquainted with the things of the earth, but also you have to manage a large estate and deal with different sorts of people. So Xenophon in his Economicus that Cicero later cites, says this is the gentleman's first training in ruling is managing his estate. And so having to manage that large estate is good training for the role of politics. And then what he says about trade here, Right.
The reason that a larger scale merchant has more potential for honor is because if he gets rich enough, he can get out of being a merchant and buy an estate and become a gentleman. And that is where, if you're going to rise, the most honorable economic position to be in is a landowner. And so the merchant is honorable to the extent that he aspires to something better than being a merchant, which is to become a landowner, which is more conducive to a service to the state, leisure, the ability to cultivate your virtue, the ability to learn how to command different sorts of men. So this reveals the.
Also, by the way, if you think about Thomas Jefferson's agrarianism, he gets that from the Romans and this idea that the agricultural people are the people of God. Right. This all comes from the Romans.
[00:21:21] Speaker D: Yes. And there Is, I think it's interesting that Cicero offers the merchant kind of a stair step progression as he's aspiring to getting out of the merchant class, shall we say? There's not a separate merchant class, but the merchant occupation and moving to the landowner. There is a sense also in which as he gets. Gets bigger, he starts to have those managing skills that Ethan, you were talking about.
And so he's not just doing his own business, but he's looking at the various trade routes and managing his ships and various other merchants who are under him, et cetera. And so he is training himself actually for the occupation of landowner through those activities.
And then the, the elder Cato is of course, the.
It's a separate treatise, but it's named for, of course, the Cato, not the Cato that Cicero talked about earlier in the book, who committed suicide in order to avoid Caesar, but the Cato, who is that Cato's father, and who was known as Cato the sensor, and was known for his severitas, his severeness, and his adherence to the old ways. And so by drawing upon the legacy of the elder Cato, Cicero is linking himself to the mores, to the social customs, to the history of Rome as well.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll just add this last, all really interesting points, the interesting kind of nexus or connection between the point about skill and the point about benefiting others to the skill point Catherine made and the scale point Chris made. That's kind of interesting thing.
There's this interesting line about if people engaged in trade are ever satiated or satisfied and as Ethan said, prepared to kind of graduate to being landowners. And I wonder if that does connect again to Aristotle's ideas about why he doesn't think finance and trade are good occupations. Right. Because I think in his idea there's not a natural limit to them. Right.
To be a good money maker is to make more and more and more and more money. And that's how you know you're doing a good job, is you're making more money, is the argument. Right. And so I wonder that connects here. So he says, if they are satiated and satisfied and say, okay, I've engaged in this, in this trade enterprise, I now can move toward a different occupation. Then I wonder if that's kind of part of what he's saying as well.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Yeah, very good. Thank you, Ben. I'd like to try to tackle chapters 152 and 153 together at least before the end of this episode. Getting in here now to the final section of book one, where Cicero begins to compare the different virtues that we've elaborated. There's four categories of virtues we've talked about. Wisdom, justice and social virtue, greatness of spirit or nobility, and then modesty and seemliness. He's going to begin comparing all these and trying to bring them together into a vision of how we should balance them in the life of an excellent person.
I'll read 152 and 153, though they are quite long together, and Ethan ask you to lead comment.
[00:25:00] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: I think that I have explained well enough how duties have their roots in the different elements of what is honorable.
However, there can often be a conflict and one may need to compare possibilities, each of which is honorable, to determine which is the more honorable of two honorable courses.
Panaetius omitted to discuss this topic.
Everything that is honorable has its source in the four elements. The first, learning, the second, sociability, the third, greatness of spirit, and the fourth, moderation.
It is often necessary in selecting one's duty to compare these with one another.
In my view, those duties that have their roots in sociability conform more to nature than those drawn from learning.
This can be confirmed by the following Suppose that a wise man were granted a life, plentifully supplied with everything he needed, so that he could by himself and completely at leisure reflect and meditate upon everything worth learning. But suppose also that he were so alone that he never saw another man. Would he not then depart from life?
The foremost of all the virtues is the wisdom that the Greeks call Sophia good sense, which they call phronesis, we realize, is something distinct, that is, the knowledge of things that one should pursue and avoid.
But the wisdom that I declared to be the foremost is the knowledge of all things, human and divine, and it includes the sociability and fellowship of gods and men with each other.
If, as is certain, that is something of the greatest importance, then necessarily the duty that is based upon sociability is also of the greatest importance. Moreover, learning about and reflecting upon nature is somewhat truncated and incomplete if it results in no action.
Such action is seen most clearly in the protection of men's interests and therefore is concerned with the fellowship of the human race. For that reason, this should be ranked above mere learning.
[00:27:19] Speaker C: Yeah, so here again he's setting up part of what the discussion is going to be in the second book.
So when we look at two honorable courses, we have to be able to decide which is more honorable of the two. And the rest of this discussion in paragraph 153, the place I would go would be Aristotle's Ethics, where Aristotle presents you with this choice, which is more. I'm not sure he uses the word honorable. But which form of learning is better or which form of wisdom is better? Is it prudence, the life of action, or is it contemplation?
The advantage of contemplation for Aristotle is that we get to contemplate the highest things which are better than the things of this earth. And so that might be superior.
But I think Cicero perhaps has that in mind. Although what Aristotle was doing in the Ethics is also a bigger discussion. But Cicero is insisting, right, that the sociability is to do the duties that are required of us by sociability, that is the more honorable, that we should do our duty to our neighbors and to the state.
And that has to take precedence over learning for its own sake.
[00:28:52] Speaker D: Yes. And there's to jump over to another Cicero work. I believe it's De Oratore.
Cicero in on the Orator says that there's a distinction in his own day, and in ours as well, between the speculative virtues, the virtue that is
[00:29:20] Speaker A: good
[00:29:20] Speaker D: thinking, the contemplative virtues and the active virtues.
And he chalks this up and says, oh, well, this is Socrates.
Socrates separated these two, and they were together before that. But then Socrates made this distinction, and now we've got these men. On the one hand, we have the philosophers who are all about the contemplative virtues. And then on the other hand, we have the orators, the statesmen who are all about the active virtues. And ne' er the twain shall meet except in Plato's mythical philosopher king.
But Cicero advocates for reintegrating, and so he says the orator must also be a contemplative man. And so I think that's what he's doing here as well in his definition of wisdom, because his definition of wisdom includes the knowledge of all things human and divine, and includes the sociability and fellowship that gods and men have with each other. And so there's an active piece to wisdom for Cicero as well. So the distinction between Sophia and phronesis is a little bit less hard for Cicero, I believe, than it would be for someone like Aristotle.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really helpful. I was kind of wondering where he's placing the wisdom that he's declaring to be the foremost between Sophia or Phronesis. And it sounds, I guess, based on what you said and Catherine and what I read here, it seems like he's saying, yes, I am advocating for Sophia. Like he's using the word Sophia. Right. As wisdom is the highest virtue but it's not just a wisdom. That's for sitting in a cave with all your books by yourself or in the ivory tower, just thinking cool thoughts and proofs and everything. It's for helping people and meeting men's or people's interests.
And it's interesting here he really stresses the things divine as well. Right. Sort of the whole cosmos that has divine beings, the gods and the men, and that comes out even strong. I think he's mentioned that some, but really, really strong here.
Yeah, I mean, it's consistent with everything we know about Cicero. I like that he's always talking about the engaged life, as if you have to choose superior to the non engaged. Right. The purely contemplative or the life of service to the state and the country is especially prized and honored.
And so I think here, we see that here.
[00:31:54] Speaker D: Right?
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Very good. I agree with you guys. I do see some tension here between the way Cicero presents this and the way that Aristotle might defend the contemplative life or the contemplation as being the highest activity of the person for just the same reasons that Cicero might reject it. You can do it by yourself. You can do it without the assistance of other people. It can't be taken away from you. It doesn't require endurance and resources in the same way.
I'm impressed here. This pays off. Something I said, I think way back at the very beginning of this podcast when Josh Bowman and I were talking about wisdom, Cicero, I said, kind of races, Catherine, you might have been there too. Cicero kind of races past wisdom to begin talking about justice. Because that's really, I think, where his heart is. And as a father, perhaps he's warning his son Marcus against the sort of the too Platonic view of speculative wisdom as being separated from action.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the way he presents his method here. To say, here's the thought experiment. If you could have wisdom without justice or justice without wisdom.
But my maybe more sympathetic reading of it, in brief, is that I think he may be saying, which serves the other right. We're wise for the sake of just action and of helping humanity, et cetera. We don't do the one, we don't just pursue justice so that we have a peaceful state in which to read our books. Right. So our leisure is not disturbed while we contemplate great truths. It's quite the opposite. And that strikes me as a very, very Ciceronian, very Roman attitude towards the intellectual life. Important, yes, but integrated into a vision of sociability which includes the relationship of gods to men, the knowledge of things human and divine, which puts wisdom in its proper place, high but not highest. So that's my take on that, which I thought was some great stuff here from Cicero. Obviously, I think we're a little bit over our normal time and we've come to the end of chapter 153. I think that's where we will end this episode of On Duties. You've been listening to the Cicero On Duties podcast. I want to thank my three co hosts, Catherine, Ethan and Ben. I want to thank you for listening. I hope that if you enjoy this podcast, you'll share it with a friend and subscribe to it. And please join us next week when we will wrap up book one of Cicero's On Duties. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.
