Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Welcome back to the On Duties podcast, a production of the Ciceronian Society. We are reading through and commenting on section by section, Cicero's great work On Duties. And we're picking up again here with episode five, taking a look at Cicero's descript, Cicero's discussion of justice.
This is a good place for me to mention at the start of this episode that we are not a society dedicated to the study of Cicero.
He is our namesake and our inspiration. But our mission as a society is to explore the themes of tradition, place and things divine. This is one of the first things we've done as a group that's focused specifically on the work of Cicero. So while it's valuable, there's a lot else to the Ciceronian Society in our programming, our conferences, our journal, and our other podcast, the Sower, besides the the work of Cicero. So I wanted to mention, for anybody who's enjoying that, that there's quite a lot more to Explore on our YouTube channel, on our website, ciceroniansociety.org/cetera. So I'm Chris Anadale. I teach philosophy at Mount St. Mary's University. And joining me for this episode of the podcast is Catherine Bradshaw. She is a Latin and Greek fellow at the Ancient Language Institute and a regular attendee at our conferences. Katherine, welcome.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Chris. I'm happy to be here.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Why don't you tell us a little bit about us and your background so we know what to expect from your contributions, and then we'll get back into reading cicero at book one, section 20, where we left off.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Certainly. So, as you mentioned, I teach for the Ancient Language Institute, which is an online school, and I teach Latin and Ancient Greek for them at the college level to adults around the world. I'm also an adjunct instructor at Abilene Christian University, teaching first year Greek in person.
So my areas of interest are where William Shakespeare's works, the classical Greek and Roman literature, and literary tradition and virtue formation meet. And so one of my fascinations in that work is on the concept of duty. So officium, pietas, all of these related concepts are very dear to my heart. And so hence Cicero's De officiis, which actually influenced Shakespeare quite a bit, is a natural focus of mine.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: That's fantastic. That's great to hear. In fact, let me do this. Before we even get into this, Josh and I have had a few episodes before talking about the foundations of virtue, about the nature of duty, and about this first virtue of wisdom, which I said, Cicero is a kind of man of action. A man of public life sort of speeds past because that's not really where his heart is.
What does officiis mean? What is an officium? I've described it sometimes, trying to grapple with it with Josh as something like what is appropriate to one's station in life.
What further light can you shed on that vocabulary for us?
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Yeah, so you're hitting very nicely on the fact that ophikia, that's the plural of officium, is officia. So officia are things that are required of one.
They are things. So the Oxford Latin Dictionary talks about how it is what one is bound to do in the way of service, one's duties or obligations, moral obligation, as well as the actions that fulfill those duties and the sense of that obligation.
So it's very much a. This is what I owe to other people because of my station in life, because of their station in life, because of my family ties, the. The unchosen obligations that I was born into, the unchosen community that I was born into, that shapes my officia. So family, country, etc. Those are the things that I owe.
Service and dedication and action toward.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Oh, that's. That's fantastic. Let me ask you this, just, if you'll permit a philosopher's question. Are they always contingent and circumstantial? Is that. Does that just shape what they are, or are they essentially like sort of social facts about you?
[00:04:34] Speaker A: They're.
Wow, that is an excellent question.
They are generally socially. They are generally contingent.
So if.
It depends. So if I am born in. Well, I'm born into a family, so I owe duties to my parents.
Now, if my parents were no longer with us, thankfully, they are here still, but then my officia to them would no longer apply, as they would if they were living.
However, they are part of the law of nature, so they are natural duties that I owe. So it's not essential to me as a person, but it is something that no person does not have.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: Okay, that makes perfect sense that everybody should honor their own parents, whoever they are. Right. And there's nobody who doesn't honor parents. So that's. That's very good. Okay, well, thank you for that. That interlude. I've been wondering about that for a while, whether we were thinking of. Of the. The title word in just the right way.
Let me pick up where we left off with the be section or chapter 19. We'll go through 19 and 20 and then talk a bit about them. This is where Cicero is shifting from what he's saying about wisdom to Introducing the topic of justice in the first few chapters here, I think he makes some general observations about the nature, the origin of justice, and some concepts like property and keeping one's word fidelity that are connected to justice. So I'll take the beginning. We are in the middle of page nine, if you'd like to read along with us in the Cambridge text version.
Here we go.
We have now discussed the first source of duty.
Of the three that remain, the most wide reaching one is the reasoning by which the fellowship of men with one another and the communal life are held together.
There are two parts of this justice, the most illustrious of the virtues, on account of which men are called good, and the beneficence connected with it, which may be called either kindness or liberality of justice. The first office is that no man should harm another unless he has been provoked by injustice.
The next, that one should treat common goods as common and private goods as one's own.
Now, no property is private by nature, but rather by long occupation, as when men moved into some empty property in the past, or by victory, when they acquired it in war or by law, by settlement, by agreement and by lot.
The result is that the land of Arpinium is said to belong to the Arpinites and that of Tusculum to the Tusculani.
The distribution of private property is of a similar kind. Consequently, since what becomes each man's own comes from what had in nature been common, each man should hold on to whatever has fallen to him.
If anyone else should seek any of it for himself, he will be violating the law of human fellowship.
So that's the end of section 21.
I'll offer you first comment on this, Catherine. What do you think?
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Well, I think it's interesting that Cicero divides again. Cicero, the consummate orator.
We must have our definitions first.
So saying that not just justice is the most important, illustrious, the most respected of the virtues, and it's the source of goodness, which is a very Aristotelian thought.
But then the fact that you have to subdivide it into. You have justice proper, and then you also have what's in Latin called beneficentia or liberalitas, the generosity or the good deeds that go with justice. So there's that 2 Division.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I was curious about this. We won't get to liberality for some time now, but it sounds like that he's gonna consider separately the actual activities that you do to put your justice, your goodwill towards your fellow man into action, huh?
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. So it's similar to you and Josh talked about the difference between the complete good and the medium good.
So Cicero is still making those differentiations throughout.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: Fantastic. Okay, makes sense.
My thought beyond this was as well, that he gives us the two offices of justice. Right. Do not do anyone harm unless you've been provoked by injustice. So you don't harm anybody except under provocation. And the provocation has to be that an injustice has been done to you. And so that justice would be compatible with restoring order.
And then this idea of defending common goods, right to treat common goods as common, respect them as common and don't try to privatize them, and respect private property. And then there's this discussion of the way in which all goods are held in common at first. And so private property, we don't really have a labor theory of property here. Instead, he says that private property becomes ours out of the common stock of property. And for this reason, respect all property wherever it is. If it's common, leave it common. He'll say more about that in the coming sections. And if it's private, respect it. So it's an offense against justice to do this. But offenses against property are offenses against justice and flowing out of the need to live in a human community being properly related to your fellow humans. Right?
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yes. And this is a piece of kind of ancient thought in general, that it seems often, at least in the kind of peripatetic and Aristotle and Plato tradition, that it's not just private property is not just. It's important because it's mine. It's that if one does not respect private property, then the whole of the community is damaged.
It's like Cicero says, if someone seeks to violate someone's private property rights, he violates the law of human fellowship. So it's the entirety of what makes society a society is violated by violating property rights. And it's interesting, he does say for sources of privatization that it's living there, winning it in war or agreement.
So it's not quite what we see in the 1600s and 1700s theories, but it's oddly resonant, which would make sense because all of those authors would have read Cicero.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Right, that's actually. So here's a place where we see that property disputes between individuals actually concern the whole the city. That properly takes an interest in the fact that I've stolen some of your property. Because it is an attack not just upon you and your property, but upon the public order as a whole. That's a nice way of tying it all together.
So would you like to read chapter 22. Or shall I?
[00:11:58] Speaker A: I'm happy to do so.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Fantastic. Please do.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: We are not born for ourselves alone, to use Plato's splendid words, but our country claims for itself one part of our birth and our friends another.
Moreover, as the Stoics believe, everything produced on the earth is created for the use of mankind, and men are born for the sake of men, so that they may be able to assist one another. Consequently, we ought in this to follow nature as our leader, to contribute to the common stock, the things that benefit everyone together, and by the exchange of dutiful services, by giving and receiving expertise and effort and means, to bind fast the fellowship of men with each other.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Go on to do.23 as well.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: All right. Moreover, the keeping of faith is fundamental to justice, that is, constancy and truth in what is said and agreed. Therefore, though this will perhaps seem difficult to some, let us venture to imitate the Stoics, who hunt assiduously for the derivations of words. And let us trust that keeping faith is so called, because what has been said is. Is actually done. Fiat of injustice. There are two types. Men may inflict injury, or else when it is being inflicted upon others, they may fail to deflect it, even though they could.
Anyone who makes an unjust attack on another, whether driven by anger or by some other agitation, seems to be laying hands, so to speak, upon a fellow. But also, the man who does not defend someone or obstruct the injustice when he can, is at fault, just as if he had abandoned his parents or his friends or. Or his country.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Wow.
That's great stuff.
You can feel the orator sort of singing through the words here. If I could take.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Always the orator Cicero.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, we're not born for ourselves alone. We live in community. We live in a society, as they say. And I love this expression here. Our country claims for itself one part of our birth and our friends another.
So I have loyalties. I've sort of motivated action, not just for myself and my interests, but for the sake of my country, my people. I have a people. And it's not, as you said before, it's an unchosen relationship. It's not really voluntary for me to be loyal to my people. The example I try to use to communicate this to college students sometimes is the situation of Michael Corleone at the beginning of the Godfather, the movie.
He's.
He's sort of got a foot in two worlds, right? Between sort of the American war hero and member of the Italian family. But he has some choices to make. But the obligations on him are not sort of optional in a sense that. That's kind of the part of the. I think the moral drama and the tragedy of his character is that there are claims upon him that he has to fulfill. But more about that some other time perhaps.
The Stoics here mentioned twice. And Cicero kind of thinks of himself as a sort of a Stoic, doesn't he?
We should imitate nature, right? Let's follow along with nature and align our will, ourselves and our practice with the divine Logos, with the order of things, so that we can exchange dutiful services and bind fast the fellowship of men.
I'd love to hear your comments, including on his. I'm not sure if he's meaning this as a pun at the end or sort of a teasing reference to the way the Stoics are always drilling down on language. What's your take on those things?
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Well, this is a fun one. As someone who likes to delve into the etymologies of things myself, the teasing reference here is actually sort of a cover up for Cicero's. Cicero has been saying this in other places for a while.
And so this is not just like, oh, I got this from the Stoics. He's sort of using the Stoics as cover here.
And so, yes, it is kind of a pun, but it's more of a.
What he's saying here is that the word fides, which is the word for faith, trust, keeping one's word, loyalty, it has an enormous semantic range in Roman literature.
And so this word probably grew out of the word fiat, which is in Latin for let it be.
And that's the case he's making. And he's made this several other places before. He writes de officiis.
So, yeah, and Cicero doesn't. He considers himself sort of more aligned with the Stoics than the Epicureans. But he finds the Stoic tendency to quibble about words all the time very annoying.
Which is one of the reasons why he doesn't say, like, I am a Stoic, and why other places. The Stoic character is one of the people he argues against.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Ah, okay. I appreciate that. That's good to know more. Good to talk to somebody who's more widely read in Cicero than me.
It's interesting to me. Yeah. The keeping faith vides comes out of fiat, that it should be done.
So he finishes this chapter by talking about injustice, which is going to occupy us through the next five or six chapters or so, that there are two kinds. There's a positive injustice where I inflict injury upon someone else without provocation of a prior injustice. And then there's this later kind of injustice. He's going to use this to criticize Plato coming up. This is where this attracted my attention as a philosophy teacher.
If one fails to stop injustice when one could, this also is a violation of justice. And so men who should not defend someone, that's just as much his fault as if he had abandoned his parents.
That's fighting words, is it not?
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Indeed. Particularly in that culture where it is right under. And Cicero talks about this later in Deofiki is. But the duty to parents is right underneath the duty to country. And it's.
It's pretty close.
So this is a very bold statement to make.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. Well, let's dig into the next four chapters, are relatively short, and deal with this first kind of injustice. Why don't we at least begin those in this episode and we'll see how much further we can go. Okay. All right, I'll take over, if you don't mind.
This is chapter 24 at the bottom of page 10.
Those injustices that are purposely inflicted for the sake of harming another often stem from fear. In such cases, the one who is thinking of harming someone else is afraid that if he does not do so, he himself will be affected by some disadvantage.
In most cases, however, men set about committing injustice in order to secure something that they desire.
Where this fault is concerned, avarice is extremely widespread.
Riches are sought both for the things that are necessary to life and in order to enjoy pleasures. In men of greater spirit, however, the desire for wealth has as its goal influence and the opportunity to gratify others.
Marcus Crassus, for example, recently said that no one who wanted to be preeminent in the republic would have wealth enough if he could not feed an army on its yield.
Magnificent accoutrements and an elegant and plentiful style of life give men further delight. The result of such things is that desire for money has become unlimited. Such expansion of one's personal wealth as harms no one is not, of course, to be disparaged. But committing injustice must always be avoided.
So, Catherine comments on this.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: I particularly appreciate how Cicero traces the. The. The connection between fear and the commission of injustice, because I think. I think in modern days that's not generally what injustice is. Is traced to.
And of course, injustice being not.
Not giving people what is their due. And so it seems that a lot of times there seems to be a kind of a systemic thing that we must blame in the modern world. But for Cicero, it's no, this is. This is. This is born out of fear. This is born out of a desire not to be injured oneself.
And so it's a very human way of reading injustice. It's not that the person who commits the injustice is always a moral monster. It's often that they fear some injustice being done to them first, and so they preemptively attack.
And. And he. He saw this all over the place in his own life through the civil wars. Because this is. This is, of course, written after Caesar has been assassinated and as Antony and Augustus are rising to power and are controlling things.
And so Cicero is himself, I think, fearful of what Antony in particular will do.
But the. The. The things that he has seen are so many times attributed to. Oh, Caesar feared to be killed and therefore crossed to the Rubicon and did something illegal or something like that.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Okay, Yeah, I noticed this. He's fear is a common source of injustice. Desire for something which is maybe a little bit more common.
And then he speaks about riches for the pursuit of pleasure, but then also men of great spirit. He talks of. I don't know much of the history of Marcus Crassus, but I have heard people refer recently to the idea of being able to privately support an army as a sort of test of whether one could be preeminent in a collapsing republic. That has a sort of sort of menacing sound to it.
But then. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Sorry. Crassus was the richest man in Rome in Cicero's lifetime. And so this comment is partially.
It's possible that this is autobiographical because Crassus ran out of money at one point during one of his campaigns. And so after that campaign, he rose to be the wealthiest man in Rome. And so that Crassus was sort of a rival and enemy of Cicero's until he died in battle. And so Cicero is interested in Crassus and his injustices and why they might have come.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah.
That's the idea as well, that if you want to be really preeminent, how much wealth is enough to pay the army out of your own pocket that then win their loyalty? Definitely a sign that the Republic has fallen and that we're moving into strange new times ahead. Right.
The final note here, very Ciceronian, I think expanding one's personal wealth when it harms no one is not to be disparaged. It doesn't positively recommend it, but we won't disparage or insult it, but one must never commit injustice.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
Let's see. I think I read that last bit. Would you like to take maybe 26 and 27?
[00:23:44] Speaker A: Certainly.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Finishing up with positive injustice sounds good.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: However, men are led most of all to being overwhelmed by forgetfulness of justice when they slip into desiring positions of command or honor or glory.
That is why we find the observation of Ennius to be widely applicable.
To kingship belongs neither sacred fellowship nor faith. For if there is any area in which it is impossible for many to be outstanding, there will generally be such competition there that it is extremely difficult to maintain a sacred fellowship. The rash behavior of Gaius Caesar has certain has recently made that clear. He overturned all the laws of gods and men for the sake of the pre eminence that he had imagined himself in his mistaken fancy.
There is something troubling in this type of case, in that the desire for honor, command, power and glory usually exist in men of the greatest spirit and most brilliant intellectual talent. Therefore, one must be all the more careful not to do wrong in this way. In every case of injustice, it matters a great deal whether the injury was committed through some agitation of the spirit, which is generally brief and momentary, or purposefully and with forethought. For those things that happen because of some sudden impulse are less serious than those inflicted after reflection and preparation.
But I have now said enough about actually committing injustice.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Very good, thank you. So we have. I assume the reference to Gaius Caesar here is to.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Yes, to the Julius Caesar.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: The Julius Caesar who. But this is being written about six months after Caesar's assassination, I think, in autumn of 44.
That's my understanding.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: Sounds right to me.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Things I've read. So definitely, very much, we might say in the news, the big late republic, early imperial event that everybody is still buzzing about, and he calls it. This is a very troubling thing that happened, that a man who was so interested in preeminence was led across the Rubicon, as you say, but led to commit injustices.
Is this political commentary on the part of Cicero, or is he trying to make a sort of moral point to the reader?
[00:26:01] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Fair enough.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: So Cicero was very much a supporter of the assassins of Caesar after the fact.
And so there is a current that kind of runs through the de officiis of little comments that sort of justify Caesar's assassination and comment on it in this less than complimentary way.
And then also at the same time, the idea of offering moral exempla. So exemplum in Latin is example.
Go figure. But it's. It has this extra oomph for the Romans because the way that the Romans trained their children in moral instruction was not through a sacred text per se. So it's not like Christian spiritual formation where it's based in scripture. But it was through telling the children these stories of these great men, usually from the distant past, but also from the recent past of this person, did this be like him? This person did this, do not be like him. And so that the, the idea of offering examples is not just, oh, I'm going to give you an illustration. No, this is. This has a moral dimension to it.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: That's interesting because as well, I'm thinking of a friend who's teaching a high school class that. Covering the Aeneid. And of course, the Aeneid begins Virgil's writing around not quite the same time, the same century. Perhaps my sense of dates are off, but Virgil at the beginning certainly plays up Caesar as being destined for divinization. Who will dwell on Olympus with the gods? And you get the feeling of the sort of partisan spirit that is here, even among the greatest writers of the age, that everybody's got a side and everybody's sort of pushing. They've got a take on whether Caesar, good or bad, deserve to die, deserve to live, et cetera.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely.
The great authors are still human beings who have their own opinions.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Right, right. So we've gotten as far as.
I'm sorry, let's see here.
What else? Oh, we have a final comment here towards the end about.
Well, it matters whether it was deliberate or sort of passionate, sort of a moment of passion, because it is more blameworthy, of course, to contemplate, to deliberate over and then to deliberately inflict.
Well, in both cases it's deliberate, but with, we might say, malice aforethought, he doesn't do much more than just note. This is an aggravating factor here at the end, doesn't he?
[00:28:50] Speaker A: Right. And I think it's because he assumes that his audience, you know, Marcus in this case, will just agree with him and it'll be very obvious to him.
But this is a, this is a thread that runs throughout the philosophical tradition from which Cicero is drawing. Because malice aforethought is something the, the Stoics think about. It's something the Aristotelians think about.
Is it better to be overruled by passion or to have thought of it beforehand? Obviously it's, it's non malicious if it's overruled by passion. But this is one of the reasons why the Stoics don't want you to. They do want us to subdue our passions because they lead us to do things that are against nature.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: Right, Right. We might say that we're indirectly responsible in the sense that we're responsible for those passions, but what they force us to do is sort of at one removed perhaps from what we deliberate over.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Right. And for Aristotle, it would be, you know, what we are habituated to do and what we have habituated ourselves to do.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Right.
Well, thank you very much, Catherine. We are, I think at the end of our half hour for this episode. We have just finished with chapters 20 through 27 of book one of on duties and I want to thank Catherine Bradshaw for being our guest today and thank all you guys for watching listening to the On Duties podcast. We'll turn to more of Cicero's thoughts on justice in the next episode. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching and thank you, Katherine.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: Thank you.
