Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Josh Bowman: Hello, you're listening to On Duties, the podcast of the Ciceronian Society. We're reading through Cicero's De Officiis. It's not showing up in my blurred out background there, but yeah, there we go. We're reading through the Cambridge History of Political Thought texts for this particular podcast. We hope you can read along with us. There's also plenty of free, free versions of this seminal work of Cicero's online. I'd like to thank the co hosts here, Katharine Bradshaw of the Ancient Language Institute and Christopher Anadale of Mount St. Mary's University with us today. I am Josh Bowman. I'm the executive director of the Ciceronian Society. And we are having a spring conference March 11th through the 13th at Regent University in Virginia beach next year. Really excited about that. I anticipate this will be our biggest conference ever. However, the proposal deadline is September 1st. That's coming up real quick. If you like to write or talk about Cicero in particular. Anybody else we've talked about, like Machiavelli has come up a lot. That'd be a great panel topic. Or Cicero's other books. Right. There's lots and lots of things that we could cover at this conference and within the humanities and social sciences and things like that. All are welcome. You do not need to be a member of the Ciceronian Society to propose a paper. I really. There's no requirement other than to be a good proposal. Not all proposals are accepted, so please consider sending a proposal. If your proposal is not accepted, you certainly can and should still come. We'd love to have you there. And it is a great time. It's everyone's favorite conference every year and I'm sure you will not regret being there. So I'm going to hand it over to Chris. He's been facilitating this for the whole year now. Been doing a great job. And we'll go. We're going to start in chapter 30.
[00:01:54] Chris Anadale: Right. Thanks, Josh. So we are partway through book two of De Officiis. We are book two. Book two is Cicero's treatment of the useful or the beneficial and its role in living a good life and life of virtue. We've just read through the end of chapter 29 of book two. So we'll begin with chapter 30 in just a moment.
Chapter 29 ends with Cicero saying, now then, since it is obvious that the power of goodwill is great and that of fear is feeble, we must next discuss the ways in which we can most easily acquire with honor and faithfulness the love that we desire. So that's the setup for chapter 30, which we'll begin with right now. Catherine, may I ask you to read chapters 30 and 31 and then Josh lead off comment for us?
[00:02:42] Katherine Bradshaw: Certainly.
But we do not all need these equally. For whether a man needs to be loved by many or whether a few will be enough must be determined by the life he has adopted. Let this be taken as fixed and primary and most necessary that one should have faithful companionships with friends who love us and who esteem our qualities. For this is one thing in which there is no great difference between outstanding and ordinary men, and it must be acquired almost equally by both of them. All men perhaps, do not equally need honor, glory, the citizen's goodwill. However, if these do fall to anyone's lot, they are quite helpful, among other things, in acquiring friendships. But I have spoken about friendship in another book, which is entitled Laelius.
Now let me discuss Glory. There are indeed two books of mine on this subject also, but let us touch upon it as it is of the greatest assistance in conducting matters of importance.
The peak and perfection of glory lies in the following three things.
If the masses love you, if they have faith in you, if they think you worthy of some honor combined with admiration, these, if I must speak simply and briefly, are brought forth from the masses by almost the same things as they are from individuals. But there is also another approach to the masses which enables us to infiltrate, so to speak, into the hearts of everyone together.
[00:04:06] Josh Bowman: Yeah. So he's just finished talking about, Right.
Why it's so stupid to try and rule by means of fear. Right. This is what Machiavelli is going to respond to this and give the opposite answer centuries later. And now he wants to say, like, look, okay, it's better to be loved.
Well, how does that happen? And, you know, I read this in some ways as a political scientist to a point, because it almost sounds like he's talking about political and social capital, earning people's trust and, and love and affection and glory and admiration. All these things.
Sadly, you know. So we have the Lius Dia, his book on friendship, which I'd love to discuss in the podcast at some point.
And we've lost the digloria on glory. He apparently wrote another book just on glory, which we do not have. But this gives us a window into what he has to say here. And this is such a. It's a. It's a weird word when you think about it. I.
I'm struck by.
If I was going to define glory, especially as a Christian, I'm still going to struggle the Thing that I think of as light. That's the first thing that comes to mind.
What is glory? It's shiny. That's not necessarily a philosophically compelling definition, but I do think there is something here, because he's talking about.
Cicero lives in this world of politics and action and law and whatever. And so much of one's authority and friendships and ability to. To do good in many ways is based on your reputation and what people think of you and how they admire you and how they honor you.
Of course, you know, and maybe he's going to get to this later, but, you know, the ability to do a lot of bad could also be based on your reputation as well.
And so I think there's. There's something to be said about that. Now he says this is in chapter 31, the three things that you need to have to have glory. If the masses love you, if they have faith in you, and if they think you worthy of some honor combined with admiration. I think that's the key point of this part right here. So how are we going to get those three things? If they love you, why do they love you? Do they love you because they have faith in you, or do they have faith in you because they love you? That could be an interesting challenge here.
You know what. What makes someone lovable to the masses?
Because especially in. In the Roman context, it is not even. I don't think it could be too much close. Too. Too much close.
Yeah, we're just not going to use correct English grammar here today. It couldn't be too close to what we are doing here in the. The modern world. Right. You can be very lovable online to a point, or get a lot of fans, if you will, a lot of followers and be a remarkably objectionable person and not necessarily be faithful. Right. I mean, that's. Those don't necessarily go together in the Roman context, though. What does it mean for someone to be lovable?
Is it. And is it just seeming to be lovable? We'll come back to that in the next episode.
Then. Faith in you, right? I mean, that's. How do you earn that faith and trust? I think that's a. That's a key part of any political or social regime.
Do you trust them? And then this next one. I'm going to confess I'm struggling to know what he means by this. If they think you worthy of some honor combined with admiration, is this admiration or honor tied to a specific achievement?
Is that what he's going with?
[00:07:44] Chris Anadale: Or
[00:07:46] Josh Bowman: what is the difference between honor and love?
Do you. Do you, honor? Can you honor someone you don't love? Do you love someone you don't honor, perhaps?
And if so, what does that mean? So those are just kind of my initial comments, but, yeah, I'll kick it to you, Chris.
[00:08:02] Chris Anadale: Yeah, thanks. I think that I just extend a little bit of the thought there by building on something he says at the very end of chapter 30, beginning of chapter 31. Before talking about glory, he talks about friendship. In a sense. Glory is the type of social capital that the politician needs to have. If you're going to be a man of public affairs, you need to acquire this kind of glory for yourself, which consists of all these things. But even the humbler, sort of lower rank, less ambitious, less capable, politically capable sort of person needs friends, needs people with whom to cooperate. And I take it here that Cicero's not suggesting that this sort of go off in two directions, but that the glory builds upon the foundation of something like the friendship that one builds and is worthy of. All men need the. Do not all need honor and the citizen's goodwill. It's okay if they despise me, if I'm a private person, but all of us need and are helped in our affairs by acquiring friends and by being worthy of friendship. So I would read glory here as a kind of politically necessary, sort of supercharged quality connected with the acquisition of friendship. So my thoughts on some of what you said, Josh, the masses must love. You take that to include affection, but probably also more than that, the clamor that a successful leader will acquire. I'll sort of set up Catherine here to actually give us the historical answer, perhaps, and the linguistic one, if there is one.
They must have faith in you. They must trust that you keep your word, that you do good things, that you are the leader that they believe in and can continue to believe in, that you will be faithful to your promises, that public trust reposes worthily in you.
And I identified this same passage, Josh, that you were looking at. That they must think you worthy of honor combined with admiration. That is, they know that you are an exceptional person, that you deserve honor. They provide you with the honor, and in doing so, they also admire you. So it's not that they honor you for something out of fear, or they honor you out of sort of. Sort of being awestruck at your magnificence. They honor and admire you sort of together. I was taking that that and to be that they must honor you with admiration rather than honoring you without admiration. We might think of a sort of fame which would include giving honor without admiring, or perhaps admiring without.
Without honoring. So it's quite evident here, the thing I would contrast in our own contemporary life is fame, including perhaps social media, Internet fame. How's being famous different from having this kind of glory? It seems to me that Cicero is really zeroing in, right, on just those sorts of things. You have to be excellent, you have to be worthy of honor. People have to recognize your worth and sort of give you the full package of honor with admiration, faith, and love.
Catherine?
[00:11:08] Katherine Bradshaw: Yes, well, there's so much here, as you both pointed out.
So to get to the question of love, the word here is diligo is the verb that's being used. And this is a word that means to single out to value, to esteem, to prize as well as to love. It doesn't just mean affection.
If we're talking about affection, often with a more romantic sense, that's amo. That's a different. That's a different word. Diligo is the kind of affection that one has for family as well as for other people.
But it has this idea of, I also like, I choose you. It's related to the word for choose.
So I find this valuable and esteem it.
So if the mass is diligent, if they love you, then it's not just that they have an affection for you, though that's there. It's that they find you worthy of affection. There's a statement about you that's in there, which then brings it into, how does this work with the question of whether the person has the good faith that's going to play into this and whether he is worthy of honor? And that honor word is that same honorableness word that we had in book one. It's the same word.
No, sorry, it's not the same word.
[00:12:42] Chris Anadale: It's.
[00:12:42] Katherine Bradshaw: It has the same root. They're different words, but they have the same root.
And so there is this way that Cicero is connecting all these threads that we've had from book one together here, and saying, okay, how do you do this in politics? Here's how you do it in politics. But also, as you said, Chris, here's the connection to private life. So even if you're not going to be a politician subtext, Marcus, I know you're not super ambitious right now.
You're still going to need these qualities. You're still going to have to go after glory. And even though it is hard to define, Josh, as you mentioned, there is a.
A bit of admiration in glory for the Romans. They have. It's an. It's a. It's a thing that you get from other people.
It's not.
I think as Christians, we tend to think of glory as something coming from the. The being who is glorified, I. E. Like God is glorious, he has his own glory.
But for the Romans, it's an external thing mostly. And yes, you earn it, but it's something that's given to you by other people primarily.
[00:13:53] Josh Bowman: It's really interesting.
Before we read on, there's three things. First of all, what you just said about glory and its source, I think is so important of a distinction here from a Christian standpoint. Where does our glory come from? The glory, it all belongs to Christ, to the Lord for what he's done, not to us. If any glory we have, it is because he has shared it with us. Right? And I think that's such a great contrast to the Roman world.
If my glory is dependent on the masses, you know, who could stand? And this is also where, you know, Cicero doesn't bring up his own life, but it's kind of. It's another part of the subtext here. Catherine, you're right. Part of the subtext is, Marcus, I know you're not that ambitious yet, but you still need this.
But there's also. Cicero probably would give his own life as the example. Like, look, I'm the one who was really loved. They had faith in me, and I was worthy of some honoring combined with admiration. But Machiavelli would come back and say, look, you're actually proving my point. Cicero, look how fickle that love was. It lasted for a second. And then they exiled you, you came back, they liked you again, they threw a parade, everything was great. And then they kicked you out again. Right? I mean, there is something. I'm not saying Machiavelli is right, but you can see where Machiavelli would laugh at this saying, like, it'd be much better to be feared because that love seems to be very, very fickle. That glory seems to be very fickle. And then one more thing.
Something about this glory in politics made me think of, and I think this is still true. So someone correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. I think in Japan, when they do an election, they don't print ballots like we do in the United States, where you select a name. If you're voting for someone in Japan, you write their name down in Japanese and you put it in the ballot.
It's. It has to be incredibly inefficient because how. I mean, think of all the people we know who can't write. I mean, in Japan, I mean, these are mostly older people. They. They're voting, but no one wants to change it. And this is why, because it makes the politicians in Japan feel good. They're like, I. I just really feel the warmth of someone writing my name down on that paper and putting it in there. I feel honored. I mean, that's certainly a key word in Japanese culture. Right?
Um, and it made me think of that, that dynamic. How. How funny would that be in. In the United States? Like, how many different ways did. Would people have spelled Donald Trump? I don't even want to know.
I will read.
Just. Just to continue here, I'll read chapter 32. Chris, that work?
[00:16:23] Chris Anadale: Yes. Just 32. Thank you.
[00:16:24] Josh Bowman: Yeah.
First, then, of the three I have listed, let us look at advice concerning goodwill.
This is secured most of all by kind services. But secondly, goodwill is aroused by the willingness to provide kind service, even if one's resources are not perhaps adequate for it. A vigorous love is aroused in the masses, however, by the very reputation and rumor of liberality, of beneficence, of justice, of keeping faith, and of all the virtues that are associated with gentleness and easiness of conduct.
For because the very thing we call honorable and seemly pleases us in itself and moves the hearts of all by its nature and appearance, shining out brightly, so to speak, from the virtues that I have mentioned. Because of that, when we think people possess these virtues, we are compelled by nature to love them.
These, indeed are the weightiest causes of loving, for there may be a few more trivial ones besides.
[00:17:27] Chris Anadale: All right, thanks, Josh. This is interesting treatment here of goodwill. And I'll just limit my comment to noting that we have this very sort of practical attitude, beginning with, well, the first and foremost way of getting goodwill is to do kind turns for people. Secondarily, being willing to do kind turns, kind services to them, even if you're not fully able to.
And then finally, well, considering the masses, even if they think you might, you have a reputation for potentially giving good services. They get very excited and they. They extend you all of this goodwill. So this is kind of going from, you know, being benevolent to wishing to be benevolent even if you're not fully able to be. So, not benevolent. Beneficent. Right. Beneficence. Benevolence, maybe deprived of the ability to do it right.
Cicero seems to rank that. Second, where I'm thinking towards a modern philosophy class I'm teaching this fall, Kant would actually rank those equally right. Being willing to do the Right thing is sort of equal weight with actually doing it. He might say it's not relevant to Cicero, but a change from his system. And then finally, what the masses think. The masses sort of. Well, somebody has a reputation for being liberal and giving generously to his followers. That's enough for us, for the crowd, and for the mob.
And Josh, as you emphasize in your reading, he does say we are by our very human nature compelled to love people who show these traits or who seem to have them. So from being to wanting to seeming, that that's where human nature automatically goes in terms of goodwill and esteem.
Catherine?
[00:19:12] Katherine Bradshaw: Yeah, that's the. The ranking is really important here. And I think this gets back to. We've touched on this several times where Cicero is such a practical philosopher. And so he says the doing is the most important. And then if you want to do it, but you can't, it's hasn't. It hasn't reached that level of virtue because he says the test of virtue is in the action, but it's.
You get credit for wanting to anyway.
And it's interesting to me that there is a vigorous love aroused in the masses by the reputation. It's not even just a slight favor, because this word for goodwill is also a word that means favor or friendship as well. Benevolentia.
Funny where there's. Where we get our word benevolence from, but it is. It is the amor. The love is called out very strongly, even just by the reputation and humor of liberality. If you are the type of person who is benevolent, the masses give you huge credit for it.
Even if it's just your. Your nature and it's not necessarily an actual virtue. It's just the way you are by design.
Yeah.
[00:20:38] Josh Bowman: And I think that seeming and being is important. When I first read this, I made a note saying, like, does he care about whether it's real or not? And the answer is yes. When I came back and wrote chapter 43, he's going to say, yeah, you can't just seem to be this way. But you also can understand why he's saying this. Just, you know, if someone's never done a service for me, whatever, I could still get a sense of what someone would be. That someone is willing to help me out. Right? So I've known Chris a long time.
If by some strange turn of events, I'm homeless and by myself, I'm guessing Chris would give me a place to sleep. Like it's such a weird scenario where that would happen. But Chris has never had to provide me with Clothing, food, shelter, none of this. But I know he would do it. Same with Catherine.
It's knowing that someone has that kind of affection and love and would be willing to do so if the need arose.
And I think that that's a powerful part of friendship. And one of the things that is perhaps happening in Cicero's time in Rome, especially after the Sullin prescriptions, after Julius Caesar, after Mark Antony, all this stuff, is that both at the level of the elites and the politicians and at the lower levels, that's going away where the faithfulness, the trust and that honor is no longer there. And that's a huge opening for a totalitarian, tyrannical regime to step in and be like, we'll take care of you, or it's a huge cause of homelessness and poverty and social poverty and material poverty, where if you don't think that this person is willing to. To help you, whether they're able to or not, and you're not willing to ask for help, that starts to have an impact on society at every level. So that I, that.
[00:22:29] Chris Anadale: That.
[00:22:29] Josh Bowman: That's what came to mind there. But, yeah, I don't want to belabor that point.
[00:22:35] Chris Anadale: Okay, let me move us on to the next chapter. It's my turn to read. I'll read chapters 33, 34 and 35 together, and Katherine, you'll begin. Comment.
We can bring it about in two ways. That others have faith in us if we are deemed to possess both good sense and justice combined with it. For we have faith in those whom we judge to understand more than us, who we believe can foresee the future able when the issue arises and the crisis arrives to settle the matter, adopting the counsel that suits the circumstance. For men reckon that such good sense as that is useful and genuine.
As for just and faithful men, however, that is good men. One has such faith in them that no suspicion of deceit or injustice arises.
That is why we think that we are absolutely right to entrust to them our safety, our fortunes and our children.
Of the two, justice has more power to win faith indeed, although it has authority enough even without good sense. Good sense without justice is of no avail in inspiring faith.
The more cunning and clever a man is, the more he is hated and suspected if deprived of the reputation of integrity.
The result is that justice combined with intelligence will have as much power as it wishes to win faith.
Justice without good sense will be able to do much without justice. Good sense will avail not at all.
I'm actually going to stop there. At the end of chapter 34, I think that's a good breaking point for us. Catherine, would you like to comment?
[00:24:18] Katherine Bradshaw: Certainly. There is, as with all of these sections, there is so much here. So you have.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna Skip down to 34 for a minute because this is, I think, one of his more surprising sections a bit because he'll say, he says justice without good sense, or prudentia, prudence, to use the older translation, can do much, but good sense without justice is incapable of doing anything good. And I think that that stops us short a little bit as moderns, particularly post Machiavelli.
But there is something there, particularly for the Romans, because this is one place where the Romans and the Greeks diverge.
So the Greeks have.
Justice being is a very important virtue for them. And Aristotle says that it's the main social virtue. And so it is. It is extremely important. However, the Greeks are the inheritors of the Homeric tradition. And the Homeric tradition very famously has the Odyssey in it. And the Odyssey, and I'm talking about Homer, not the movie that just came out.
The Odyssey has a trickster as its main character and the guy you're supposed to root for. And yes, he has his own way of executing justice. It's not that he's an unjust man. Exactly. For the Greeks. For the Greeks, he is an admirable man, though he has his faults and though you might not be able to trust him all the time.
The Romans have a very different view of Odysseus. They see him as trickster par excellence, but they do not like him. He is portrayed very negatively in the Aeneid, and for them, actually, Odysseus would often be considered this example of good sense without justice. And Cicero actually uses him as an example earlier in the book of someone who will do anything to get what he wants.
So there is this question of, okay, but what about someone like Odysseus? Well, I think that Cicero would say that this man is able to do certain things, but he cannot be the virtuous man that Cicero is pointing to because justice will at least have a sense of what one should do, even if it's without good sense of applying it all the time. Whereas good sense, he says the, the. The smarter and more capable a trickster is, the less I will be likely to trust him because he's just good at deceiving me.
[00:27:08] Josh Bowman: Yeah, I, I had not thought about the Odysseus connection, but that makes perfect sense here. I also wondering if he's thinking of people like Sulla, Caesar, Marius, Anthony, you know, they.
I. I mean, maybe I'm.
Does anyone think of Caesar as stupid?
Right? I mean, there's. There. I think there's certainly a competence there, right? People would have faith. I mean, and this is. He was so. He could inspire so many soldiers to trust him because he was. He was just brilliant at how he did what he did.
Was he just. Well, I don't think Cicero is going to say that. Maybe more just than others, but it certainly is going to be a challenge to come to that conclusion.
And so I think that's part of what he's saying here.
So he says the result is that justice combined with intelligence will have as much power as it wishes to win faith. But justice without good sense will be able to do much. Without justice, good sense will not avail at all.
So it's not just enough to be competent. You got to know right from wrong. You got to have this sense of.
You have to have virtue right in that sense. And I think that's.
That is so different than what we. We have. I think again today and in other contexts where it's like, well, hey, they're really smart. They made a lot. Look, they made a lot of money. They must know what they're doing. They must.
They must be up to something good.
But you could be really, really brilliant and unjust. I mean, I think that might be the way Cicero is going, going with it here. And I'm glad, Catherine, you brought the word prudence, because that came to mind reading this chapter, is that that's.
That's kind of what he's aiming for. But again, he's going to make that distinction right between. I mean, to an extent, Aristotle does, too. Maybe not at the expense of Odysseus. Right.
The distinction between prudence and cleverness that Aristotle makes, I think is important. Prudence is aimed at some good, at justice itself, or cleverness is kind of indifferent. That's the oversimplified way that I describe the difference between the two. But, yeah,
[00:29:20] Chris Anadale: yeah, I think you're exactly right. And I note here that although he begins by saying, look, there are two ways to win faith, and he seems to say good sense and justice, he ends up saying, well, you know, justice is more important. And by the end, he's saying justice is the only important thing, in a sense, justice is necessary.
Good sense is helpful, provided you have justice, but without justice, that's your sort of your absolute necessary condition. So you cannot inspire faith in other people if you don't have justice. It seems to be so among your leaders. Who do you want? Well, start by reducing your pool to the group of just people. And then select the best and most intelligent ones with good sense from among those. But don't go looking anywhere else. Don't thinking that the crafty, the wily, the trickster, the liar. Odysseus. I know the Romans do think of him very negatively for just that reason, right?
They don't consider him to be honorable, I think in the way that maybe other warriors are.
And this is kind of description of what faith is. We have faith in those whom we judge to understand more than us some intelligence there whom we believe can foresee the future. Okay, maybe that's the result of experience, prudence, maybe divination. Who knows, but who are able, when the issue arises and the crisis arrives, to settle the matter. Adopting the council, listening to the right people, the right advice to settle the matter correctly. He's talking about the leadership of a state who can be the good leader.
That's the one who receives the good faith of the people. Has to be a just person. It helps if he's a just person who's also got a lot of good sense. But the justice is the absolute necessary condition without which you cannot be. You cannot receive the good faith of the people. I might ask on Coyle's behalf, since Coyle's not here this week, is Cicero correct about this? I mean, is he actually making a factually false assertion about the way that one acquires good faith? I don't suppose we'll settle that right now, but I wanted to raise that up. Any final thoughts before we conclude this episode?
[00:31:38] Josh Bowman: Yeah, I like that coil question before we conclude, because there's a cynical part of me that says Cicero needs to rethink this because think of how varied our visions of what is just incompetent are. Right.
What I think if I see this leader do something, I think this is absolutely stupid. I cannot believe people think this is a good idea and others are saying it's brilliant. I can't believe this is wonderful.
He has brought justice to this situation and it's astonishingly out of touch with how I'm defining it. I'm not a relativist or a subjectivist. I'm not suggesting that, and of course, neither is Cicero. But I am saying that in practice, recognize that what is labeled as competent and just, unfortunately, is often hard to agree upon unless you share a bunch of other assumptions in context. Right. I think that's a much longer conversation. But, you know, what do we do with that? That interminable uninliminal plurality of opinions and ideas and philosophies there.
[00:32:56] Katherine Bradshaw: Yeah, also, I'll, I'll, I'll jump in on the coil question just quickly.
I think this gets back to a couple episodes ago. We were talking about how some of this advice only applies to people in a free state who can pick their leaders.
This, this also there's a. This only really works in certain situations. And one of those situations is that you have a virtuous populace.
So if you have a virtuous populace, they will pick upon whom to set their affection and their goodwill. Well, if you have a vicious population, then you'll have people who are motivated by those sordidissima, you know, most sordid motives of money and such things. And so the beneficence. Beneficence will get twisted. And so I think that Cicero is presenting a vision in which some of his words can get redefined depending on how virtuous or vicious the population is.
[00:34:05] Chris Anadale: Yeah, that's a great reminder, of course, that the seems like a classical Roman republican principle that the virtue of the people is the safeguard of the state, the inspiration for, for modern political founders as well. So we'll conclude with that. We finished through Chapter 34 of Book 2 of De Officiis. You've been listening to the Cicero on Duties podcast from the Ciceronian Society. I want to thank again my co hosts Josh Bowman and Catherine Bradshaw. We hope you'll join us again next week for another episode. Thanks for watching today. Goodbye.
