Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Hello. Welcome to the On Duties podcast. We're so glad you're joining us again. We're continuing our reading of Cicero On Duties de officiis. I am joined today. By the way. I'm Josh Bowman, executive director of the Ciceronean Society. I've been off for a couple episodes and you have been graced by the presence of Catherine Bradshaw of the Ancient Language Institute Institute of Abilene, Texas, as well as Chris Anadale at Mount St. Mary's University. We're so glad you're joining us again. I want to continue to ask you to leave some comments and feedback as you read along with us with Cicero On Duties. We don't know everything. I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff we're missing, so please chime in, ask us questions, let us know what you think of this. We appreciate the feedback we've received so far. Please keep it coming.
Once again, I also want to invite you to look at our other podcast, the Sower, and consider signing up for the Ciceronean Society's newsletter. There's a lot more from. There's a lot more than what we are offering you here. I can't talk anymore. We're just going to keep going. I didn't take Cicero's rhetoric classes to not talk over my words. But we are starting in book one, chapter 34.
In previous episodes, we began the discussion of justice. We're not done with that yet.
And today we're going to start looking at justice in warfare in particular, and then going from there. So I want to invite Catherine to get us started here and read chapter 34 and 35. Oh, by the way, as a reminder, we're using this version. Oh, yeah, Chris, go ahead and hold yours up. It worked better. Catherine has the newer one. This is the Cambridge text in the history of political thought. We're using that translation. So, Katharine, if you could start us off with chapter 34.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Certainly.
Something else that must very much be preserved in public affairs is the justice of warfare. There are two types of conflict. The one proceeds by debate, the other by force. Since the former is the proper concern of a man, but the latter of beasts, one should only resort to the latter. If one may not employ the former, wars then ought to be undertaken for this purpose, that we may live in peace without injustice. And once victory has been secured, those who were not cruel or savage in warfare should be spared. Thus our forefathers even received the Tusculani, the Aequii, the Volskii, the Sabini, and the Hernici into citizenship. On the other hand, they utterly destroyed Carthage and Numantia. I would prefer that they had not destroyed Corinth, but I believe that they had some specific purpose in doing so. In particular, in view of its advantageous situation, to prevent the location itself from being someday an incitement to war.
In my opinion, our concern should always be for a peace that will have nothing to do with treachery. If I had been followed in this, we would still have some republican government, if perhaps not the very best, whereas now we have none. And while you must have concern for those whom you have conquered by force, you must also take in those who have laid down their arms and seek refuge in the faith of generals. Although a battering ram may have crashed against their wall, in this matter, justice was respected so greatly among our countrymen that the very men who had received into their good faith cities or peoples conquered in war would, by the custom of our forefathers, become their patrons.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Thank you, Catherine. I love when Cicero says something to the effect of, had you just listened to me, everything would be fine. That's. That's a good thing. And so we're talking about justice and warfare, and I think you can see here a precursor to what will become the Christian just war theory. It's already in here, I think. You know, I think there's appeals to natural law and to duty. There's also.
So one of the things, too, here that he's.
I think, is important is he's saying there is something dehumanizing about war, both if you're being. If you're suffering it and if you're engaging in it. Now, this is not.
When you think of Rome, you think of violence, you think of war.
This is. This is not a peaceful civilization. Pax Romana was the exception, and it's not. And actually, we can talk about that, right? What is. He's kind of hinting at what. What that pox is for, but he's. He's associating, you know, being in war as being a beast, which is. Is striking coming from a Roman. And I think it's also encouraging that he's. He's at least moving in that direction. He's. He does not celebrate war, but it's going to be necessary. He's not a.
He's not an idealist in this sense, where he thinks that we. We can avoid it. And he gives these different examples.
And so I. I also think there's something here where you may have brought this up in a previous episode, but now that we're talking about war.
There's also this change in the way we think of that word officiis. Right. That it's not just the offices of the individual to other individuals in relationship to one another.
Could it be said. And maybe Catherine, you know more about this in terms of the origin of the word and the etymology than I do. But it could also be said that there's something to the effect of a nation's office relative to other nations, a country's office relative to other countries. Now, the modern notion of the state is an anachronism here, but there are nations, right. There are peoples. And so can you talk about an office of a people in the same way you talk about an office of individuals?
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's really important point. So the idea that he's talking about, particularly with the last part of 35, where he's talking about how conquered peoples have been sort of received by the victorious generals into their patron network, this is, this is an individual thing. So the patron client network in ancient Rome is the wealthy will be patrons and there will be less wealthy or freeman freedmen, ex slaves, who are their clients. They will get food or money or something from their patrons. But in exchange for.
There's an implication that if you run in an election, I will vote for you if you're my patron. There's also just a lot of duties that are both ways here.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: And that's an individual thing. But then what.
The word that, that, that is for what happens to the conquered enemies when they become part of the patron client network is patron nikium. And so this is. They're admitted to. They become the clients of the general, even though they're another people group almost.
So it gets expanded from the individual level to the.
We would say international.
They would say something like between city states or between. Between peoples.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Right, right. Chris, what are your thoughts on this initially?
[00:07:24] Speaker C: Well, I was thinking what you said about, you know, Cicero is a Roman and here he is talking about limits of warfare, the beast, the bestial nature of warfare. But I was thinking to myself, he's also a talker and he says, look, we prefer talk to fight, and if we're going to make the transition, there has to be a certain type of talk that preced.
That's going to be coming up in the next section.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:46] Speaker C: We have to say certain things and give certain opportunities to avoid this.
And it does look like there's something like an ethic of war here. And a question I had really written down about a later section, but I can raise it. Now, is Cicero talking about a kind of moral obligation in warfare, or is he merely talking about the kind of duties that apply to a republic, a nation, a people, or the combatants, the generals, the citizens, sort of doing what is appropriate to their office?
Do you take what I'm meaning here? Is there a specifically sort of moral ethical question at stake that he is sort of embedding within his discussion of duty here?
[00:08:29] Speaker B: I think so.
I'm not going to say that with a deep confidence, but I think, especially as we see later and prior to this, how there are just certain limits. He has a very, in my view, kind of an underlying Aristotelian disposition, if you will.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Don't take this too far, because there is, if we can think of the mean, right, the moderation of Aristotle and Cicero as being kind of a moral standard that he's.
That there is something to that. So I think it is moral. It's not just strategic. It's not just for instrumental purposes, that there actually is a goal behind it. And I also, I like the fact you said he was a talker, because if you think about Cicero, no one remembers Cicero for military prowess. This is not. That's not his thing.
He did have experience there, but it was not positive. He's not.
I mean, it was not how he was going to succeed, let's just put it that way.
And I think there's something like, why don't we just leave it to the talkers? I think it's a great, a great point. But anyways, the moral question, Katherine, what are your thoughts on that?
[00:09:39] Speaker A: I completely agree and would say that Cicero is certainly building toward the idea that there is a moral obligation here. I think we're going to see that in the exempla, the examples that he puts forward later in later sections, because a lot of those have to do with moral dilemmas and moral questions, particularly about whether one should keep one's word to the enemy or not.
So there is definitely an underlying moral dynamic. And it's not just, well, it's expedient to keep your word because otherwise the other one won't keep his word. It's definitely a no. You should. You ought to do this.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: I think it's just as before we move on. Thinking about his comments earlier in chapter 35. On the other hand, they utterly destroyed Carthage. That doesn't seem to bother him or any Roman, for that matter.
I would prefer that they had not destroyed Corinth. Do we know what he's talking about here? And I Look at the. The note.
He says that Carthage and Corinth, or at least the. The. This is the annotations right from the. The editors. Carthage and Corinth were destroyed in 146 BC Numantia, 133 BC. Cicero's unease about the destruction of Corinth, condemned later in the book, shows in his sophistic attempt to bring it under the rule that war should be undertaken only to ensure peace when diplomacy is inapplicable. He was reluctant to admit that the imperialism of our forefathers was as ruthless as that of his own time. And so he's.
There's always a tendency, if there's notice, to be believed if the destruction of Corinth was unnecessary. And again, I don't know the history well enough.
He wants to believe that our forefathers were always better than us, which is also true.
You know, we don't want to believe that maybe, just maybe our four, you know, as Americans as well, like, maybe we're not. You know, there's a lot more war today.
Our forefathers wouldn't have been as enthusiastic as we are about it, perhaps.
But there is. There's a Just. There's some uncomfortable moments right. In our. In our history, as there are in Roman history.
All right, I think we should move on then, to chapter 36.
[00:11:55] Speaker C: Actually, Josh, can I jump in with just one or two more comments about 35? I don't want to delay us, but I'd made a note about.
Maybe we've covered this already. But he says before he talks about mercy towards captives and sort of the moral reason for that, he doesn't ground it in a kind of utilitarian thing. You need to be merciful to them so that they will be merciful to you. Or it's kind of what we would recognize as a kind of international law, as being a kind of standing agreement that none of us will sink below a certain level. He says it's because the purpose of war is to live in peace and to live in peace without injustice. So don't do anything at the end of the war that's gonna contaminate the peace with a kind of injustice or cruelty.
And that seemed to me to be pretty important in terms of figuring out sort of both the origin and the boundaries of this ethic of warfare that he's leading us towards.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: I wonder if there's something to be said about.
Does Cicero have as much of a concept of just peace as he does of just war? I don't know if he would say it that way because I think that that's always a part that we don't talk about enough. We talk about just war and just war theory. But what about a just peace? Right. What about a.
Because you can have peace and injustice, you can have the lack of conflict.
But is it true? Pox. Right.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: And this is something that Cicero had to think about quite a bit because his negotiations between Caesar and Pompey during the civil war between those two, he says over and over in his letters and things, I'm trying to negotiate peace so we don't have war. Civil war is the worst. We really don't want that. And so he's willing to accept some things that are sub optimal, to put it mildly, in order that we don't have civil war. Again, because remember, Cicero is also thinking about, you had Marius and Sulla, you had bunches of civil wars before Caesar and Pompey, so you have all of that going into it. And the question of Carthage and Numantia and Corinth gets into the different types of war that we'll talk about later as well. So those definitely get brought up. Corinth, the Romans are kind of uncomfortable with generally. But Carthage and Numantia are also debatable. And the fact that Cicero lands and says, no, that was fine to destroy Carthage and Numantia does say something about the Carthaginians particularly. And we'll get into more of that later, I think.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Right. Carthago delenda est. Right? Is that how I say it?
Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, Chris, how about you continue with reading? It looks like chapter 36.
Let's go through the end of that.
That next paragraph where the one that ends with the word enemy.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: Yeah, sure, happy to do that. It's on page 15 of this text. So indeed, a fair code of warfare has been drawn up in full accordance with religious scruple in the fetio laws of the Roman people.
From this we can grasp that no war is just unless it is waged after a formal demand for restoration, or. Or unless it has been formally announced and declared beforehand.
When Popilius was general in charge of a province, Cato's son was serving as a novice soldier in his army. Popilius then decided to dismiss one of the legions and included in the dismissal the young Cato who was serving in that legion. But when, out of love of fighting, he remained in the army, Cato wrote to Papilius saying that if he allowed him to stay in the army, he should bind him by. By a fresh military oath. Since he could not injustice fight the enemy when his former oath had become void, such was their extreme scrupulousness when making war.
So I go into chapter 37, then.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:15:58] Speaker C: There actually exists a letter of the elder Marcus Cato to the younger Marcus in which he writes that he has heard that his son, who was serving in Macedonia in the war against Perseus, had been discharged by the Consul. He warns him, therefore, to be careful not to enter battle, for he says, it is not lawful for one who is not a soldier to fight with the enemy.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: That's really interesting.
It's a very different.
First of all, it sounds like in ancient Rome, at least at this point, you. You. You could be.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: You.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: You could be a soldier, but it was never a permanent situation.
You were not a lifelong. I mean, there certainly were lifelong soldiers. I mean, Caesar, for all intents and purposes, but there certainly is a sense in which it is a temporary position in which there. The. The oath has a. A time stamp, if you will. I was. I thought this was a curious footnote or an interesting footnote here, because this chapter 36 begins with an allusion to the way Rome would declare war. And this says the old Roman practice was for the priesthood of the fetiales to deliver an ultimatum to the enemy, demanding compensation for his alleged oppression. If no satisfaction was forthcoming, a threat of war was announced, and war was then formally declared by the Roman assembly. Cicero, or here is inexact. He means all three conditions to apply, essentially, the assembly, the rebuttal of the offer, and what the priests offer. It's interesting here because as with everything in ancient Rome, there is no, you know, the idea of a separation of. For lack of a better word, church and state is not a thing. Right. The religious rights, the state, they're all together. There's no distinction. And so when it's an announcement of war, it's the priests who do it, even though they're not. They don't really have a say in the decision so much, but they are part of the process. Because it's religious, Is this because we're not.
And again, I. I doubt that this is actually what Cicero is saying, but was there a Roman belief that when we go to war with another nation, we're not just fighting their people, we're fighting their gods?
Is that.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: What.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: What's. Is that part of what's going on here is that overstating.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: Depends on which period you're talking about and which people you're talking about? Okay. In the ancient world, there is a Sense in which the gods fight with each other when the states go to war. Cicero is. Because he's very much in the Aristotelian tradition and in the skeptical or. Sorry, he's one of the descendants of the peripatetics. So the Aristotelian school that doesn't really like saying anything for certain.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: So he'll say, we're. We're more sure about this. We're not fully sure, but we're more sure. So he's. I doubt that Cicero would have said, well, our gods are going to war with their gods, but this is an idea that's very much in the water in Rome. There's also the sense that the gods are watching over any sort of oath.
And the declaration of war by the. The fetiales was an. Involved. An oath that the. One of the. One of the fetiales would swear we are going to war for just causes. So the. The gods are involved in everything for the Romans.
[00:19:34] Speaker C: Yeah, that.
Yeah, that. That fits with my reading. I mean, the. The text I know most closely is Festal de Colange, the ancient city, which is a great text, but about a much older period with influences that sort of echo down through the ages, even into the time of Cicero. But it does seem to me it's important that it start with a religious event and sort of religious authority. One, that's the highest authority, and two, it tells the enemy. We're actually serious about this. This is not a bluff. This is not a negotiating tactic. Right.
We are calling upon our gods in the name of our gods that, you know, in the sight of all the divinities, you have offended us, and we demand satisfaction.
We still see, of course, traces of that in our own culture. People swear an oath to tell the truth in the sight of God. And that's.
There's also, I think I was thinking also we still have this kind of perhaps by now quaint tradition of expecting Congress to declare war on behalf of the American people before we engage in some kind of aggression against a foreign state. But that also seems to be. That there has to be some kind of solemn declaration, you know, that's both religious and political. That sort of. Before we get to the sort of bestial, sort of the lowest level bestial, actual work of smashing each other. Yeah.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
I also think there's.
Does this make war more total in a way, in the Roman sense? I don't know if that's the word. The right word, because I'm. I'm trying to think of how The Roman notion of warfare is changing and it's still going, it's going to change more. But this, this also, you can see how this is going to tie to the, the divine status of the emperor as well. Being a part of this, this military complex, it's, it's different than a, you know, today, so much of the American military industrial complex is sustained by its economic, the fact that war is lucrative, at least for some people. But not for, not, not, not for the majority. Back then you could still say that to a point, but it's certainly not the extent it is today.
And so instead that, that religious aspect would sustain it.
And how seriously did they take that?
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Well, it, it depends again on the time period, because when Cicero's writing, they don't actually use the fetiales that much.
The fetiales fall out of use and then Augustus actually brings them back in to declare war on Cleopatra.
And so to invest himself with that, I'm going back to the traditions of the ancestors. Cicero kind of glosses over the fact that the Romans don't really use the fetiales that much by the time that he's writing.
But to get to your question, Josh, I'm not.
So war in the ancient world is kind of total by definition because all the spoils go to the victor and there's no sense of an agreed upon. Well, we'll do prisoner exchanges. It's very much up to the general and all of that. So there's an arbitrariness, I think, that makes the war more total a lot of the time, as opposed to more modern warfare in the sense of the ones that are influenced by Christian just war theory, where there is an, an anticipation at least, or an expectation that there will be some mercy shown.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: If you guys are okay, why don't we move on to the rest of chapter 37.
Catherine, if you could read that, just starting at the top, that one paragraph, a further point, and then going to the end of chapter 37.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: Certainly.
So this is on page 16.
A further point is that the name given to someone who ought properly to have been called a foe per dueelis is in fact Hostis. I notice that the grimness of the fact is lessened by the gentleness of the word for Hostis, meant to our forefathers, he whom we now call a stranger. The 12 tables show this, for example, a day appointed for trial with a hostess. And again, right of ownership cannot be alienated in favor of a hostess.
What greater courteousness could there be than to call him against whom you are waging war by so tender a name. Long usage, however, has made the name harsher, for the word has abandoned the stranger and now makes its proper home with him who bears arms against you.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: This. So I.
I confess, I'm a little. I'm a little lost here.
First of all, whenever you read Latin, it sounds like you're speaking Elvish. Is that. That's a compliment? It just sounds way cooler than when I say it. Hosties per duellis. You know, that's. That's how I do it.
Maybe it's because I. I tried. I tried refreshing my Latin on. On Duolingo. Let me tell you how much that. That's a bad idea. I'm enjoying myself. It actually is kind of. It's funny at times.
So I don't recommend it, though I recommend the Ancient Language Institute fully, fully endorsed that. That is. That's certainly here.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: But what's he. Catherine, what's he trying to do here? Like, why.
This is very much a. An exercise in. In Latin, right? This is a.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: We.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: We. We've changed the word.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: That we've gone from stranger. Is it. Is it that he's saying we've gone from stranger to foe?
[00:25:15] Speaker A: What he's saying here is that the. The word that they use for foe, hostis, is a word that originally meant stranger, which is.
By the time Cicero is writing this, the word they use for that is peregrinus, not hostis. And so. But he says, because it originally was like a euphemism, and then we kept using that euphemism to the point that we no longer use the word hostis to mean anything except for enemy. And so it no longer is a euphemism.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Interesting. Okay.
Yeah. Chris, your thoughts on there before we conclude.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: Yeah, it kind of goes along with the religion idea, is that, you know, it was the case that our ancestors, the Twelve Tables, regarded the enemy as sort of having a dignity of the stranger.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: He's not our existential foe who needs to be destroyed and exterminated and the land plowed with salt, although it may come to that. But they use the same sort of legal term that they would use to describe, you know, a foreigner living among us whom you can't sell property to or the like.
So it's just a matter of saying what I'm saying here is not some sort of philosophical revolution in Roman practice. I'm just talking about the way in which the better instincts of our ancestors, reflected in our language, sadly now decline, so that the word hostis now is used to refer to somebody bearing arms against you.
But I think he's just pointing to. He's linking up with tradition, isn't he, and saying, you know, the best of what Rome has been is reflected in the kind of rule of war that I'm describing now.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: I really like that. I like the fact that Cicero always brings us back to what do, what do words mean? Right. That makes me think of Tolkien in that, in that respect where we, we, we take for granted how life experience, our environment, all these things, they shape the words that we use and the words we use shape it in return. Right. There is a sense in which how what, how we talk about this is going to shape how we respond, how we act, etc. So. Well, Catherine and Chris, thank you so much for this great episode. We're going to come back again here shortly next week and do another episode for episode eight on. We're going to continue this talk about justice and war, justice to the enemy as we move on. So thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next Wednesday.
