Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Chris Anadale: Hello and welcome back to the Cicero on Duties podcast, a production of the Ciceronian Society. I'm Chris Anadale and joining me today are my co hosts Catherine Bradshaw of the Ancient Language Institute, Ethan Alexander Davy of Campbell University, and Coyle Neal.
We've come as far as the end of chapter 22 in book two of De officiis. We're reading this Cambridge Text translation and we are going to get in this week to a discussion of the role of fear and the ineffectiveness of fear as a motivator.
A lot of modern relevance to a lot of political philosophical scholarship for many of us.
Coyle, could I ask you to take the lead off reading chapters 23 and 24. And Ethan, lead off comment please.
[00:01:08] Coyle Neal: There is nothing at all more suited to protecting and retaining influence than to be loved, and nothing less suited than to be feared. Fresenius splendidly puts it, they hate the men they fear, and the one who hates one would have debt indeed, no amount of influence can withstand the hatred of a large number of men that if it was unrecognized before, is certainly recognized now, it is not only the death of that tyrant whom the city endured under force of arms and still obeys to a great extent, though he is dead, that declares the power of men's hatred to destroy. Many tyrants have met a similar end. Indeed, hardly one has escaped such a death. Fear is a poor guardian over any length of time, but goodwill keeps faithful guard forever.
Admittedly, those who exercise a command over men constrained only by force may need to employ severity, just as a master must towards his servants if he cannot otherwise control them. But those who live in a free city should contrive to be feared. Could anyone be more insane? For however swamped the laws may be by some individual's influence, however freedom herself may cower, still, the time comes when they rise up through silent judgments or in the secret elections to positions of honor. Freedom will bite back more fiercely when suspended than when she remains undisturbed. Let us therefore embrace the course that extends the most widely, and that is the strongest, to secure not only safety but also influence and power, so that fear may be absent, but love preserved.
That is how we will most easily achieve what we want, both in private matters and in public affairs. For those who wish to be feared cannot but themselves be afraid of the very men who fear them.
[00:02:39] Ethan Alexander-Davey: Right, so there's a lot to lot to discuss here. Right, and we're going to get into the point that Cicero is making a statement here.
First of all, on behalf of a Free people. Right. A free people are not motivated by fear. They respond to fear with hatred.
So the technique of fear is dangerous for a ruler who attempts to rule over a free people.
And I would also mention that there's a long line of thinkers, medieval Christian thinkers, who take up Cicero's argument and reiterated. So John of Salisbury, for instance, and here's Polycraticus makes the same argument about how it is better to be loved than feared.
And then St. Thomas Aquinas, also on kingship, again takes up the same argument that we see here. But it's Machiavelli who reverses the terms here.
Honest, and suggests that it is, in fact better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. And that also, of course, raises questions about what sort of people we're talking about is the people for whom Machiavelli is making that recommendation. Perhaps they're no longer fit for freedom, and that's why it's easier to rule them by fear than by love. So a big Cicero statement here echoes through the ages and then in later political thoughts.
[00:04:22] Katherine Bradshaw: Yes, and there's a resistance to this, of course, in not too long after Cicero. Even Machiavelli is the most famous, of course. But then you get, famously, Caligula said, let them hate me as long as they fear me, which is a quote from a play. But this is a couple generations after Cicero, so you still have that very much in the Roman mind, as well as this tradition that Cicero is drawing upon.
And there Cicero does talk about freedom coming back with a vengeance, no pun intended, to rush in when it has been suppressed.
I think, though the quote, the NES quote, seems to indicate that it might not be just a free people. It may be just human nature in general, according to this idea, that there is a sense in which anyone who fears something also dislikes it.
And the dislike then grows into hatred, depending on how strong the fear is. And then it will go to and whom one hates, one would have dead. And so there is this sense in which, kind of like Aristotle's different types of government and Polybius saying that there is a. A cycle of governments that you will go from one to the dictatorial to the uprising, which will then cause the Republic, which will then descend into democracy, which will then go to dictatorship, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's. The free people will resist more and resist more quickly, but there seems to be a level of dislike and hatred, even if the people are servile in nature.
[00:06:34] Chris Anadale: Yeah, I think that obviously here, this is the passage, one of the Passages we'd contrast most directly with Machiavelli. And I keep going back to in my mind something that Josh Bowman said a few weeks ago about Cicero's approach to some of these same issues.
Would we indict this for being naive? In other words, there's a certain kind of political psychology at work here. He's making some definitive assertions about human beings and how they think, how they feel, how they operate, how they are motivated.
This final sentence of chapter 24, for those who wish to be feared cannot but themselves be afraid of the very men who fear them. We might ask, is that true? Is that a true psychological observation? It's phrased in very strong terms, maybe in the sort of the orator's exaggerated confidence. But is it true that the one who wishes to be feared does fear those in whom he wishes to inspire fear? That would indicate that perhaps everybody involved is far from virtue.
But we're back again to the sort of.
Not just the cycle of regimes from book 8 of Plato's Republic and elsewhere, with many precedents, the deterioration through. Through the deterioration of the moral psychology of the citizen and of the ruler. But also.
We're stuck with the paradox that if the people were virtuous, they wouldn't need to be ruled.
And if they're not virtuous, then they can't be ruled. Or we have the question of where does the virtue come from? Where is it sustained?
And beginning of chapter 24, of course, he says, anybody who, with command sometimes has to use severity as one must discipline one's servants when they won't mind.
The question here of the role of virtue in politics, obviously quite important.
That charge of naivete, perhaps, is one that I want to keep alive and find ways of addressing in the modern reading of Cicero.
[00:08:42] Katherine Bradshaw: Coyle.
[00:08:44] Coyle Neal: Yeah, I mean, definitely my gut instinct is just to say Cicero is wrong here, and naive is a more generous way to put it.
And I think part of that is because we know the rest of the story, right? We know what happens, and we know Augustus comes along and takes over, and freedom does not strike back, and it does not strike back again for 400 years through the Roman Empire.
It's just over.
Um, but I. I think maybe the way to correct that is, is to map this on top of Hobbes, to. To map this into.
There is a. A legitimate place for fear in a free society, if properly directed.
And I, I think. I don't know that. I see that, at least in this passage in Cicero. Maybe we'll get it in the next One, but I. I don't see it in this one. There. There is a place for even a free people to say we don't want society to utterly collapse around us. And we certainly don't want that to happen in the name of freedom. But again, we'll see where he goes with it.
[00:09:46] Chris Anadale: Okay, thank you, Coyle. We'll tackle next chapters 25 and 26. Ethan, would you read those, please? And Catherine, comment?
[00:10:01] Ethan Alexander-Davey: The elder Nionysius had his hair singed with coals because he feared the barber's knife.
What tormenting fears do we imagine must continually have wracked him?
In what spirit do we imagine Alexander of Pharae must have spent his life?
He, as we read, though he loved his wife Phoebe greatly, even so, when he came to her in her room from the feast, used to order a barbarian, indeed one marked with Thracian tattoos, so it is said, to precede him and with drawn sword, and used to send attendants before him to search the lady's caskets and to check that no weapon be hidden in her clothes. Wretched man. To hold a barbarian, a tattooed slave more faithful than your wife. Nor was he deceived. She herself indeed did indeed kill him, suspecting that he had a mistress.
Nor is there any military power so great that it can last long under the weight of fear.
Phalaris is a witness to that. His cruelty is notorious beyond all others. And he died not by ambush, as Alexander did, whom I have just mentioned, nor at the hands of a few men as our own friend. Instead, the entire population of Agrigentum assailed him as one. What then of Demetrius? Did not all the Macedonians abandon him and transfer themselves to Pyrrhus?
And what of Sparta's allies, who almost universally deserted her unjust command, playing at the disaster of Leuctra? And the role of spectators and men of leisure in such a matter? It gives me more pleasure to recall foreign examples than ones from home. But as long as the empire of the Roman people was maintained through acts of kind service and not through injustices, wars were waged either on behalf of allies or about imperial rule. Wars were then ended with mercy or through necessity. The Senate was a haven and refuge for kings, for peoples and for nations. Moreover, our magistrates and generals yearned to acquire the greatest praise from one thing alone, the fair and faithful defense of our provinces and of our allies.
[00:12:21] Katherine Bradshaw: Well, then we have quite the range here from the fearful tyrant. So of course we just talked about whether Cicero is naive to say that the feared is fearing.
Here he would offer actual Examples of.
A couple later, we're going to see.
Josephus records that the Herodians are this way as well.
So there's a question of. Okay, well, here we have examples. This would seem to prove Cicero's point, though perhaps not for all.
At least it supports it up to a certain level that even the closest people to a tyrant, the tyrant cannot trust them and can't even have scissors or a razor around for fear that his barber will be paid by someone and get rid of him, or that his wife will kill him because she's jealous, which actually happened.
But then you have also Cicero returning to. It's much, it's much more pleasant to talk about. Oh, over there somewhere.
But I do have to talk about us.
And there's a bunch of examples of the fall of Rome's respect internationally. The one that sticks out to me is in Sallust's the Jugurthine War, where Jugurtha, the African American warlord, comes and is before the Senate and then bribes the Senate to rule in his favor and then goes back and says, Rome's for sale. I that was easy.
And there's just. You can hear his lip curl in that statement.
And so that's just one example. But Cicero could probably point to many others of times when Rome looks more like Alexander or Demetrius than a kind and well meaning ruler.
[00:14:42] Chris Anadale: Let me add that it seems to me part of what Cicero is doing here is to motivate the reader to think you don't want to be that kind of person. Right. So the man who is so afraid of his barber cutting his throat that he has his hair singed with hot coals instead, what a torbit, what a tormented soul he must have had. I don't want to be like that. You don't want to be like that. Of course. And so let us agree that fear is this kind of discreditable, sort of disgusting thing in one's soul that one should avoid.
There's a bit, perhaps, I don't know if it comes across as comical in the Latin, but it certainly seems comical the way it's presented. He builds up to the punchline, well, she did actually kill him. But the profound point before that though, is that you have to trust somebody. And this fellow made again a kind of disgraceful decision to trust a tattooed slave more than his own wife.
Then the rug pull at the end. Well, he maybe was right to trust the slave more than his own life, more than his own wife. Think of all the modern leaders who are assassinated by their bodyguards, for example, Not a new thing.
So again, the question is though, where is virtue to be found? How do you function without virtue? How do you function without trust? Well, you can't. You just have to. You have to have virtuous people in whom you can trust. Is it your wife? Well, hopefully. If not, is it your slave? Hopefully. But then again, either one of them might be the one that turns out to murder you. So again, the question is, where does virtue come from? Where do we find virtue in the state? How do we function?
How do we function without it?
And it's, it seems already the case that if fear is a primary factor in either individual psychology or the sort of political rule of the state, things are in a bad way already.
We're not where we ought to be, not where we ideally should be, not where we can be when we're ruled by, we might say, better men like Cicero.
[00:16:52] Katherine Bradshaw: Boyle.
[00:16:54] Coyle Neal: Yeah, I took some comfort in this. I've never had the thought, I need to check my wife for weapons, so I'm not a tyrant. There's your evidence.
But I do think it's interesting. So again, I will go with Cicero is wrong to some extent. He's doing the. We had this golden age in the past, or at least a better age in the past.
And a cursory reading of Livy or Polybius or the extant Roman historians will tell you that that is just wrong.
Rome, as Augustine points out, was never particularly virtuous. They were just another country. They were as virtuous and as unvirtuous as all of the kingdoms around them, maybe more virtuous than the Greeks. So that point of comparison was okay, but for the most part there's not really a better past. But as you pointed out, that's not really what he's doing.
He's issuing sort of a cautionary tale.
This is something we should be aware of and something that we should be avoiding in our own lives. I think it's interesting that he implies, the parallel, implies a causal effect between fear and dishonesty.
Your, your reputation will suffer because you'll stop keeping your word. And you'll do that in the broader context of this discussion because of fear. And I, I don't know how often I've, I've heard that put. And I again, as, as has often been the case today, I, I don't know what I think about it, but it's, it's worth discussing and reflecting on.
[00:18:25] Ethan Alexander-Davey: Yes, I'll also corroborate Corl's point about how Cicero does tend to leave out Some of the more Machiavellian moments in Roman history, and that that itself is significant. But of course he does that because he's encouraging us to be better. He wants us to be better than that. And so again, we have a moral argument. We begin with these passages with Plato, right, that there is no one more miserable than the tyrant. The tyrant is the most miserable creature there is. And in the example, if you are a tyrant, your best friend is going to be your tattooed bodyguard. What a life that would be, right? That's not how anyone wants to live. And then of course, in the second part of this passage, he shifts the discussion from the misery of the tyrant to the Roman Empire.
The empire, if it depends on fear, then it's not going to have as good a relation with its allies. So an empire that rules on the basis of fear, rather than on the basis of acts of kind service, as he puts it, is also going to be unstable, is also liable to be hated by it's subject peoples who respond, or responding only to fear.
[00:19:55] Chris Anadale: Very good. Thank you, Ethan. Catherine, would you please read chapters 27 and 28 and I'll begin. Comment?
[00:20:08] Katherine Bradshaw: In this way we could more truly have been titled a protectorate than an empire of the world.
We had already begun gradually to erode this custom and practice, but after the victory of Sulla, we rejected it entirely. For when our citizens had suffered such great cruelty, there then ceased to be anything that seemed unjust towards allies. In Sulla's case, the dishonorable victory succeeded an honorable cause. For he planted his spear in the forum and sold the property of good men and rich men and men who were at the very least citizens, daring to proclaim that he was selling his own booty.
There followed a man whose cause was unrighteous and whose victory fouler still. He did not confiscate the property of individual citizens, but embraced entire countries and provinces under a single law of ruin. That is why we see Massalia being carried around in a triumphal procession as an example to oppressed and devastated nations abroad of the empire we have forfeited.
That is why we see a triumph being celebrated over the very city without which our generals themselves could never have achieved a triumph. For their wars beyond the Alps, I should relate many other iniquities inflicted upon our allies. Had ever the sun seen anything unworthier than that particular one. Our present sufferings are therefore just. For if we had not tolerated the crimes of many men going unpunished, such extreme license would never have come into the hands of one.
His estate Indeed was inherited by only a few, but there were many wicked heirs to his greedy desires.
[00:21:47] Chris Anadale: Well, it feels to me like Cicero is shifting as he gets closer to the present day. He shifts into more of a polemical vein. Right. Why are things so bad now? Things are awful. Why are they so awful? Well, because of bad men, because of fear, because of lack of virtue, because of the declining character of things where it's coil, as you were mentioning before, this kind of, you know, the golden age previously that we should sort of want to get back to as the kind of the orators target and the thing that he dangles in front of his audience and here of his son, young Marcus.
But of course, why are we suffering now? Because of our sins, in a sense, our sins against virtue, our lack of virtue. We're not as strong, not as good, not as devoted to virtue.
What does one do then? One doesn't just lament, one exhorts to virtue. Well, be virtuous, Marcus. Right. Love these things. Still harder for the fact that we now suffer, perhaps with justice from our contemporaries and our recent ancestors. Lack of same. So the way I would read this is polemical and also exhortatory towards his audience.
This is not the time to give up on virtue. This is the time to double down and triple down on virtue, because that's what the republic needs and what we need to pull back from the brink.
So for all of the kind of romanticization of the past, I think that's the primary thrust of this part of the text as I'm reading it. Coyle.
[00:23:27] Coyle Neal: Yeah, and there's again kind of an implicit suggestion that we embrace people like Sulla. And this other individual, which I assume is Julius Caesar, is the other one he's talking about out of, out of fear. And in this case specifically, the fear of the consequences of our own actions, the very legitimate consequences of our own actions. Well, maybe we can avoid that if we just embrace a strong man because look at how much he did for himself and his supporters or this other strong man did for himself and his supporters in the past. Well, maybe we can get us some of that again. Sola didn't pay the consequences for his crimes. Maybe we can get away without having to pay for ours. If only we have someone, someone that we can latch ourselves onto. I'm always reminded as a, As a side note, there was a made for TV series Germany, made in Germany, the early 2000s, where they had Richard Harris play Sulla. And I, I cannot think of him without imagining Richard Harris in that role. He was so good at it. Like, such a fantastic, fantastic job.
Christopher Walken as Cato the Younger, not so much. But Richard Harris was fantastic.
[00:24:45] Ethan Alexander-Davey: Yeah. So this is not the first time that he links Sulla and Caesar. Right. So Sulla is the one who essentially showed the way. Showed the way to corruption. He was the one who used the most vicious means and then also confiscated property and handed it out to his friends and allies as a way of punishing his enemies. And so Sulla set that precedent of corrupt dealing and Caesar followed the same example, perhaps on a larger scale. So the corruption of the Republic seems to begin with the example of Sulla in particular.
[00:25:34] Katherine Bradshaw: Well, and that's, it's, It's a little ironic that he links Sulla and Caesar here because Caesar was related to Marius, who was Sulla's nemesis.
And Caesar actually went. Had to flee Sulla because Sulla said, well, you're married to Marius daughter, you need to either divorce her or you're in trouble. And Caesar said, no, I'm not divorcing my wife, and so had to leave Rome. So both of those men would have bristled if they had been around to know about this comparison with each other. But nevertheless, the point still continues.
I think it's interesting that Cicero says that Caesar's estate was inherited by only a few, by which he means, you know, the, the ones that are going to become the. The second Triumvirate. So Anthony Augustus, and then later, well, the third triumvir will be Lepidus, but the inheritance of the desires, the inheritance of the.
The wish for power, the readiness to go around the law in order to get power, all of those things are an inheritance, if you will. But they're not tangible. They're something passed down in the air, shall we say, because again, of the lack of virtue. So we have, we've. We've had these exempla, these moral stories before. And so we're still pointing to exempla, we're still pointing to examples here in a negative sense, but very, very raw ones, because people still remember Caesar and the old ones might maybe remember Sulla as well. So there's an extra oomph to these exempla that would not have been for the international ones.
[00:27:39] Chris Anadale: Very good. Thank you, Catherine. We'll wrap up this episode with chapter 29, which I'll read. And Coyle, have you lead comment.
The seed and occasion of civil wars will be present for as long as desperate men remember and hope for that bloody spear.
Publius Sulla shook it when his kinsman was dictator, and again 36 years later, he did not withdraw from a still more criminal sphere.
Yet another who was a clerk in that former dictatorship was urban Quaestor in the next.
From this it ought to be understood that when such prizes are offered, there will never be a lack of civil wars, and so only the walls of the city remain standing. They themselves now fear the excesses of crime.
The Republic we have utterly lost, and we have fallen into this disaster. For I must return to my proposition because we prefer to be feared than to be held dear and loved.
If these things could have happened to the Roman people when they ruled unjustly, what ought individuals to think since then? It is obvious that the power of goodwill is great and that of fear feeble. We must next discuss the ways in which we can most easily acquire with honorable and faithfulness, the love that we desire.
[00:29:11] Coyle Neal: So this is apparently my day to disagree with Cicero, although in this case I think he disagrees with himself here. So I think the first part of that chapter of what you read there is right.
As long as there is someone who is willing to say, I don't care what the law says, I am going to pursue my own ends, then yes, civil war is going to be a risk in any society, especially in a free state. But in any society, and, and is fear part of that? Sure, I, I don't, I don't know, maybe Cicero might be right on that. But then he goes on to say that the power of goodwill is great, and that of fear feeble. And that seems to be the opposite of everything he said so far.
If, if goodwill is so great, what are they doing civil warring with each other? Like, where, where is this coming from?
It would seem that fear is actually the, the stronger influence there, and goodwill is falling before Sulla and Caesar and all of the, is being put under.
But I'd, I'd love to hear what you guys think.
[00:30:17] Ethan Alexander-Davey: Is it me? Sorry.
[00:30:18] Chris Anadale: Yes, Ethan, go ahead, please.
[00:30:20] Ethan Alexander-Davey: The. So in this, in this passage, I, I, I go back to one of the passages we read earlier where he says that the, the lowest motivation, the lowest incentive is desire for material gain.
And here what he's suggesting is that Sulla has set the precedent for this, that when there's a civil war, there's going to be a redistribution of property.
And so that gives the lowest sort of people, the most sordid sort of people, an incentive to push civil war or to encourage civil war as a means to get their neighbor's property. And so if we think about that as a, a cause of civil war? Well, I don't know. That might make us feel a little bit better about the current state of our own country. I'm not sure we've descended quite to that point yet where we would seek civil war in the hope of gaining our neighbor's property, which is the perverse incentives that have been set up with the loss of virtue.
[00:31:27] Katherine Bradshaw: Well, and I'll, I'll put forward a slight defense of Cicero here.
I think that the strength here is not strength in the sense of effectiveness per se, in this is what will happen. I think he's going back to the strength being this is what keeps a society together.
So fear doesn't keep a society together, according to Cicero. It breaks it apart because people don't trust each other. I think he's getting to what, what is now often called high trust versus low trust societies, where you have the high trust society will have a lot of good faith, will have a lot of affection for each other in the sense of I want the good, I want the good for my neighbor, my neighbor wants the good for me, those sorts of things, as opposed to a low trust society where I, I fear my neighbor, my neighbor fears me. And therefore we cannot actually look for each other's best because we're so focused on what if he hurts me?
And so that creates that distrust. And this gets back to the, the, the discussion of the spear. This is a, this is a cultural thing that I think can be a little bit confusing for, for us modern readers. The, the spear he's talking about is not just any spear, it's a spear that is stuck in the ground to indicate there's an auction happening. This is how the Romans indicate that an auction is happening, particularly an auction of war spoil. And so that's why it's so bad that Sulla's using this spear to indicate a war spoil auction. Because it's not war spoil, it's other citizens, confiscated property. And so he's treating, he's destroyed the trust that happens in a society because he said those ones, those fellow citizens of mine, our enemies, just like the barbari, the barbarians would be. And therefore I can sell off that property just like I would sell off the spoil from the Gauls or the Germani or something like that.
[00:33:34] Chris Anadale: Yeah, I think that's an excellent point, Catherine. The high trust, low trust, I think does connect it to a lot of contemporary discourse about social decay and the possibility of recovery, at least the desire for recovery.
Cicero certainly wants to establish here that we should want to be loved. We should not want to be feared. We should want to be loved. And what's going to come next in the discussion for next week and beyond of how to acquire glory is going to be the role of glory in the useful is going to be about, well, how do we with honor and faithfulness acquire the love that we desire?
Ethan, I think your point is well made. And I think in a sense, almost the entire linchpin question for. Or Cicero versus Machiavelli, perhaps, or this classical view versus a more modern view comes down to is this true or false, that the power of goodwill is great, the power of fear is feeble.
For Catherine, as you point out, whatever function we're talking about, how we understand just that phrase.
I was thinking as you were speaking, Ethan, about the fact that part of the question here is about. We might sort of take this to the scriptural question, who is my neighbor?
To whom do I owe a certain amount of goodwill? And for whom am I willing to embrace a certain kind of sacrifice?
And it seems evident when you have somebody planting an auction sphere in public to say, gather around and we're going to be auctioning off, giving away so and so stuff that we seized from him when we murdered him, et cetera, for political reasons.
The boundaries of the polity are no longer the boundaries of moral fellowship and goodwill and solidarity. I'm willing to do think of political polarization in our own time.
The enemy is living next door. And so that's the emotional moral framework in which we're acting and judging and making our decisions. And I'm reminded of. I'm going to go ahead and take the risk of telling a joke here, here.
Ethan, you may or may not appreciate this.
I heard this joke a few weeks ago, so hopefully I tell it correctly.
An Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian are good friends. And they discover that the world will end tomorrow. So they begin speaking about what they will do with their remaining time. And the American says, I'll take my son out to a ball game. We'll have a barbecue. We'll do good family things for the remaining time we have on earth. Cause that's what's most important in life, is family.
And the Frenchman says, I'm going to get a couple of bottles of wine and a beautiful girl on each arm, and I'm going to enjoy the finer things in life. Because that's really the best that this life has to offer if we have to end tomorrow.
And the Russian, after sort of looking at the horizon for a moment deep in thought says slowly and clearly, I will burn my neighbor's house down.
I may edit that out of the final edit if that's going too far for some members of the audience. But if you've come with us all the way to this part of episode, the very end of episode 30 of this podcast, hopefully you won't hold that against me.
[00:37:01] Ethan Alexander-Davey: There's nothing like a totalitarian state to destroy. Trust in your neighbors, right? So I think that's probably fair, I should say.
[00:37:13] Chris Anadale: No judgment perhaps, upon the national character of our Russian friends, but just a joke I heard.
Any final thoughts about this, about Machiavelli versus Cicero, especially before we conclude the episode.
Coyle, you ended up disagreeing with Cicero in quite a few ways today. He's just factually wrong about human psychology and the role of fear.
[00:37:39] Coyle Neal: Again, what he's doing. So certainly historically he would know that he's giving us a gloss on their history.
He would be aware of that.
And also I think this is, and you guys can correct me on this, he's writing in exile, this particular book.
So he is not writing in the heat of politics. He's writing kind of reflectively and looking back at a career. So I think we can give him a little bit of wiggle room on, on what he says towards the end.
He doesn't know that the end is coming, but we do from our perspective. But even then it's a mild disagreement. I'd still take Cicero over Hobbes or Machiavelli in Ede, even if I think they're right on this particular issue.
[00:38:27] Chris Anadale: That's fair.
[00:38:29] Coyle Neal: That's fair.
[00:38:30] Chris Anadale: Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Cicero on Duties podcast. We've read through the end of chapter 29 of book two of De officiis. We hope you will join us again next week as we get further into Cicero's treatment of the beneficial or of the useful in human life.
I want to thank my co hosts again, Catherine Bradshaw, Coyle Neal and Ethan Alexander Davy. Thank you for watching today.
[00:38:57] Coyle Neal: Goodbye.
