Episode 211 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 18 - Battle Of The Images
Date: 01/27/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3658-episode-211-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-18-battle-of-the-images/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 21–22 (page 58 of the Reid edition). The episode opens with a recap of last week: Cicero contrasted Lucius Thorius Balbus (the abundant life of pleasure) with Marcus Regulus (who died under torture for his honor) and declared Regulus the better model.
Section 21: Cicero argues that Epicureans cannot call any man of distinction from history to testify on behalf of pleasure — unlike the Stoics and Platonists who can cite Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles. Cicero also notes that Epicurus mentions female associates like Themista rather than great public men. The centerpiece is Cleanthes’s famous imagined painting: Pleasure enthroned as a queen with the Virtues standing around her as handmaidens whose only job is to whisper warnings in her ear. Cleanthes presents this image as self-evidently grotesque. Joshua argues this is less argument than mockery — an attempt to shame the audience rather than persuade by logic.
Long discussion of mockery as an anti-Epicurean tactic: Lucian’s account of Alexander the Oracle-Monger burning Epicurus’s books in the town square; Joshua’s account of Girolamo Savonarola’s 1494 Florentine bonfire of the vanities and his 1497 Lenten sermon ranting against the Epicureans; Guy Fawkes / bonfire night as example of mockery in effigy. The pattern is always: isolate an attribute, exaggerate it out of proportion, turn the audience against the target.
Section 22: Cicero brings up Lucius Thorius Balbus again along with Sergius Orata (a famously luxurious Roman businessman and inventor of the hypocaust heating system) as further examples of the Epicurean lifestyle, then says that since Epicurus himself admits profligates are not to be blamed if they can avoid pain and fear, Torquatus cannot maintain justice on an Epicurean basis. Cicero closes: “You most disgracefully enjoin and press upon us in a kind of way a pretense of justice in the place of the true and indubitable justice.” Cassius connects this to Vatican Saying 54: “We must not pretend to study philosophy but study it in reality.” And Cicero’s final accusation — that the Epicureans build the foundations of virtue “upon water” — is answered by Torquatus: that is exactly what we are doing, for pleasure and pain are what nature has given us, and that is a better foundation than any abstraction.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 211 of Lucretius Today. This is the podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
This week we’re continuing in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends and we’ll start our discussion today on page 58 of the Reid edition starting at section 21.
Last week we devoted most of our time to discussing the argument in response to Torquatus, who had said earlier in Book One that one of the ways you can prove that pleasure is the goal is to just think about the image of a life surrounded by all sorts of numerous and vivid pleasures — with no fear of the gods, no fear of death, no fear of losing your pleasures — and just thinking about this image of such a life would automatically make it come to you how desirable this is. And you can contrast it with the life of someone who is experiencing no pleasure, no hope of pleasure, nothing but pain and no hope for relief — who is also concerned about hell and the gods and just anxious about everything. By just thinking about these images it’s easy to see that the one life is highly desirable and the second life of pain is the worst possible.
Well, last week we found in section 20 that Cicero is saying: you may think that’s a good argument, Torquatus, but I can think of two examples that are similar, but I don’t accept those as proof that pleasure is the good. Because I can contrast Lucius Thorius Balbus — who checked all the boxes of what many people think is the best life, in terms of having all sorts of pleasures, being not concerned about any pains he couldn’t overcome, and who even died for his country in battle — with Marcus Regulus, who was a consul who ended up being tortured to death because he was willing to stand by his word of honor. And what Cicero says is: I can look at those two examples, Torquatus, and I do not want to be Lucius Thorius Balbus who had all the pleasures he wanted. I think that the right role model to follow is Marcus Regulus who put his honor and virtue as his number one priority, regardless of the fact that he was tortured to death as a result of doing so. So your examples, Torquatus, do not mean anything to me. I say virtue is more important than pleasure.
Cassius:
We get now to section 21. So what Cicero says now is: “You must either blame these examples, Torquatus, or you must abandon your advocacy of pleasure. What kind of advocacy is this? Or what sort of case can you make out for pleasure which will never be able to call witnesses either to fact or to character among men of distinction?
“While we want to summon as our witnesses from the records of the past, men whose whole life was spent in noble exertion, who would never be able to listen to the name of pleasure. On the other hand, in your debates, history is silent. I’ve never heard that in any discussion carried on by Epicurus the names of Lycurgus, and Solon and Themistocles and people like that who are ever on the lips of all other philosophers. Is it not better to say something about men like that than to talk through such ponderous tomes about Themista?” — who was one of the female associates of the Epicurean garden.
So in many ways Cicero’s argument always turns back to this desire to call as witnesses the men of distinction from the past, and expect us to accept that just because these men of distinction from the past have placed virtue in the center of their public actions — and because they have allegedly been unwilling to listen to the name of pleasure — that just seals the deal for virtue being the highest good and pleasure being nowhere in the arena competing for the title.
Joshua:
Yeah, Cassius, one of the things that we keep dealing with is Cicero has a very clear idea of the Roman Republic, what it takes to maintain it, and what it exists for. And everything he talks about, really, I think is in service of that idea. So extolling the people who built the Republic, the people who sustained it in the face of adversity, that’s a major part of his project — because it’s wrapped up in this whole package of: how are we going to raise the next generation of senators? How are we going to raise the next generation of consuls? What are we going to do if all these young people just turn to hedonistic pleasure-seeking and abandon politics and abandon warfare?
One thing I’ve been thinking about is there was a society in the ancient world who did all of this stuff to an extreme that probably even the Romans would have found a bit alarming. And that society was the Greek city-state of Sparta, which was a military state turned up to 11. And in Sparta, boys are taken from their mothers at the age of seven and they live in the barracks and they’re trained for the military. You have this rigid class society. When you push this stuff to the absolute extreme, it doesn’t paint a very good picture of society. And I don’t see Cicero pushing for this kind of a society — even though if you think that virtue is the good or virtue is the goal, this is kind of the end where that process would lead, which would be to a society in which the freedom that Cicero values doesn’t really exist because every person in the society is sort of a functionary of the military complex of the state.
Cassius:
Right, and when Cicero was a young man and he was with his friends, he went to study under Greek tutors. Most of the Roman aristocratic youth at the time did exactly that — they either went to Greece to study or brought Greek tutors to Rome. And it wasn’t to teach them the level of dedication to military pursuits that the Spartans were interested in. It was the Athenian ideal of education, of a love of beauty. And Cicero puts his love of virtue in exactly those terms: virtue is the good because it is noble and beautiful and good in itself. That’s kind of his argument here.
As we begin to move on to the next paragraph — what he’s essentially doing is arguing from sort of a peer-pressure type position. You should look to what other people have done. He’s not trying to tell you an argument about philosophy. He’s not trying to give you definitions or syllogisms or observations about anything other than people. You’re supposed to look at what these other people have done and follow their lead whether you understand it or not.
Then he continues on in the next paragraph. He says: “The Stoics were at war with the Peripatetics. One school declares there is nothing good but what is moral. The other that it assigns the highest, infinitely the highest value to morality, but that nevertheless there are some good things connected with our bodies and also some external to us. What a moral debate! What a noble disagreement! In truth the whole struggle concerns the prestige of virtue.”
And then: “But whatever you discuss with your fellow disciples, Torquatus, you must listen to much that concerns the impure pleasures of which Epicurus often speaks. Believe me then, Torquatus, you cannot maintain your own doctrines if you once gain a clear view of your own nature and your own thoughts and inclinations. You’ll blush, I say, for that picture which Cleanthes used to paint, certainly very neatly in his conversation. He bade his audience imagine to themselves pleasure painted in a picture as sitting on a throne with most lovely raiment and queenly apparel. The virtues near her as handmaidens with no other employment and no thought of other duty than to wait upon pleasure and merely to whisper in her ear — if only painting could convey such meaning — to guard against doing anything heedlessly which might wound men’s feelings or anything from which some pain might spring. And then we virtues, indeed, were born to be your thralls. We have no other function.”
So this is apparently a famous allusion that Cicero has recorded as Cleanthes the Stoic attempting to hold pleasure up to ridicule by saying that we should imagine a painting of pleasure on the throne of life and that the virtues — which really, according to Cicero and Cleanthes, should be on the throne — are nothing more than essentially slaves at the feet of pleasure. And this is supposed to be a picture that is so obnoxious and revolting that any person of good moral character is going to revolt at the very idea of thinking about it.
Joshua:
Yeah, so Cleanthes was the successor of Zeno as head of the Stoic school in Athens, and his pupil was Chrysippus. So the succession there is Zeno, then Cleanthes, and then Chrysippus. And if you read A Few Days in Athens by Frances Wright, which is a fictional book portraying Epicurus and his school in this time period, Zeno and Cleanthes figure as major characters in that book.
But the main disagreement here — we have to go back to this a little bit — because the main disagreement here is that what Epicurus wants out of philosophy and what Cicero wants out of philosophy are two very different things. Cicero’s aim is expressly political in philosophy. His aim is expressly oriented toward the world of action. But for Epicurus, this is not his view of things. His view of philosophy is that philosophy should be a cure for all of the afflictions that ail us in our minds — the fear of death, the fear of the intervention of supernatural gods, the fear of what comes after death. And Epicurus coming onto this stage here doesn’t have much time for the political side of things. But when it comes to making people, not just happy, but making people healthy in their minds, in the way they think — his view on this is captured in his quote: “Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young, nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old, for no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.” That’s the project of Epicurean philosophy.
So it’s no surprise that we find Cicero and Epicurus at loggerheads here, because they have very different standards for what philosophy should do.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think that’s a really key point there. And Joshua, you’re very much into poetry and various forms of art. I think it’s really interesting to dig into what it says about these opposing positions — that Cleanthes and Cicero are painting a picture of a particular type, versus a very different picture painted by Torquatus.
And I think a lot of it says something about what Cleanthes thinks his painting appeals to that the Torquatus example does not appeal to. The Torquatus example appeals to your basic sense of pain and pleasure, your basic feelings given to you by nature — that everybody can identify with viscerally. The picture painted by Cleanthes, on the other hand — it’s interesting to think about what it appeals to. Because you have to think about what the virtues represent before you can even make any sense out of the image that Cleanthes is talking about.
I don’t know that a painting like that necessarily conveys anything to somebody who doesn’t come to looking at that painting without a preconceived notion that virtue should never be placed in such a role. If I were from some remote island and I saw such a picture, I’m not sure I’d make any sense out of it at all without having been previously indoctrinated from the viewpoint of Cleanthes or Cicero about virtue — which, as Epicurus says, is sort of an empty word without meaning unless you identify it with pain and pleasure.
Joshua:
Before I go into that, let me say this: in the Forum of Caesar in Rome there was a temple of Venus Genetrix that was dedicated to the goddess on September 26th of 46 BC by Julius Caesar. That would be kind of the image of pleasure, right? Venus or Aphrodite sitting on a throne. And Julius Caesar was played up really heavily — the family claimed that they were the descendants of Venus. So there was definitely a personal connection tying him in with the goddess herself.
But as I said, I think mockery is a huge part of this. The statue of Chrysippus in the Kerameikos holding out his hand — that’s kind of a mocking response to Epicurean philosophy. But it doesn’t really stop there. Cleanthes and his mental painting is meant to mock the Epicureans. But all the way right up until the Renaissance, mockery becomes a really important approach to the philosophy.
Because if you look at Lucian of Samosata in Alexander the Oracle-Monger — his letter written to his friend Celsus — he describes the oracle piling Epicurus’s books up in the town square and lecturing the people against the Epicureans: “Don’t let these people in your homes, don’t do trade with these people.” And in the end he burned those books and threw them into the Black Sea.
And then one of my favorite examples comes in the Renaissance. There was a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola, who in 1494 kind of took control of the city of Florence. He expelled the Medicis and instituted a puritanical religious reign. He would give public sermons; there would be bonfires. People would bring things from their homes to throw into the bonfires — art, books, cosmetics, mirrors, statuary, sculptures — all this really good stuff. And in 1497 he gave a sermon in Lent ranting against the ancient philosophers and their followers. This is a section of what he had to say about the Epicureans: “Listen, women! They say that this world was made of atoms, that is those tiniest particles that fly through the air. Now laugh, women, at the studies of these learned men.” So mockery once again becomes a huge part of how people respond to a philosophy that is really appealing to a lot of people when it’s allowed to be presented freely.
Cassius:
That’s a really interesting direction there, Joshua. I’m sure there are various elements of what makes for mockery and how mockery is constructed. It occurs to me to ask whether mockery often involves isolating some one aspect of a thing apart from its full context and thereby taking it out of context, and holding it up to ridicule — and taking it out of context makes it easier to ridicule something than when seen in the full context of its original setting.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think you’re onto something there — you isolate an attribute of what you’re trying to mock, you exaggerate it out of all proportion, and then you go in relentlessly on it and you kind of egg the public on to join in on the joke. When you can’t just outright kill someone, when you can’t just burn their books, what you can do is public ridicule. And we’re very familiar with this in the age of the internet.
In Britain today they still do this — they have Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night on the 5th of November. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic seditionist who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. And every year he is burned in effigy.
Cassius:
Remind us, Joshua, of the poem that goes with it, that supposedly every English school child was taught.
Joshua:
Oh yeah — “Remember, remember the 5th of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot.”
Cassius:
And I know that from V for Vendetta — exactly where I saw it. Exactly. But so mockery — it’s very effective. And even in the ancient world philosophers were relentlessly mocked. Not just the Epicureans, but philosophers in general. Socrates was mocked heavily in some of the comic playwrights. Philosophers were seen as these kind of dopey people who always had their head in the clouds — they’d be looking up at the stars and then fall into a well, and some peasant girl would walk by and laugh at them because they can’t even see where they’re going.
And it’s very effective. It’s a very long-standing tradition. Epicurus comes in for it particularly, I think, more than most.
Yes, and that’s what Cicero does as he continues into section 22. Cicero says: “Oh, but Epicurus says — and this is indeed your strong point, Torquatus — that no one can live agreeably who does not live morally, as though I gave any heed to what Epicurus affirms or denies. The question I ask is what statement is consistent for a man to make who builds his highest good upon pleasure? What do you allege to show that Thorius, that Hurius, that Postumius, and the master of all these men, Orata, did not live very agreeable lives? He himself, as I mentioned already, asserts that the life of profligates is not worthy of blame unless they are utterly foolish — that is, unless they are subject to passion and fear. And when he proffers a remedy for both these conditions, he proffers immunity to profligacy. For if these two conditions are removed, he says that he finds nothing to blame in the life of profligates. You cannot therefore, while guiding all actions by pleasure, either defend or maintain virtue.”
Joshua:
So he’s summing up all of the old stories that we’ve already gone through. And in that list he says that the master of all of those men was Orata — that would be Sergius Orata, an interesting figure. He was a merchant, an inventor, and a hydraulic engineer of sorts. He was the one who developed the cultivation of oyster beds, which is always associated with luxurious dining, and designed the hypocaust method of heating a building — where vents or channels under the floor are heated, so the heat rises up into the home and also allows for heated water for bathing. He was a major figure in the Roman resort and spa town of Baiae.
Cassius:
And as you said a few minutes ago, Joshua, Cicero would explain: “As though I gave any heed to what Epicurus affirms or denies.” He’s certainly giving some heed to what Epicurus says because he’s writing a whole book against Epicurus. So it’s kind of an interesting exclamation that Cicero would say that at this particular point.
But again, in this section what Cicero is doing is holding Epicurus up to ridicule by isolating out this alleged focus on sex, drugs, and rock and roll as being what Epicurus thinks life is all about. Cicero has repeatedly refused to give consideration to Epicurus’s expansion of the definition of pleasure to include all of these other activities of life — which Thorius and Balbus and Postumius and Orata were doing — which were not disreputable and which were not things that anyone would criticize, even Cicero himself, even talking about Thorius who had given his life in battle for his country. You can put pleasure on the throne of the supreme good and as long as you understand pleasure properly and pursue it properly, you’re perfectly fine. But Cicero just refuses to allow that kind of an argument.
And so Cicero says: “For a man who refrains from injustice only to avoid evil must not be considered a good and just man. He is not indeed a just man so long as his fear lasts, and assuredly he will not be so if he ceases to fear. He will cease to fear if he is able to conceal or by the aid of great resources to secure anything he has done. So you most disgracefully enjoin and press upon us in a kind of way a pretense of justice in the place of the true and indubitable justice. You wish us to disregard the firm ground of inner consciousness and to catch at the wandering fancies of other men.”
Joshua:
That’s probably a good place for us to begin to close for today. When Cicero says “so you most disgracefully enjoin and press upon us in a kind of way a pretense of justice in the place of the true and indubitable justice” — that’s kind of an echo of Vatican Saying 54 where Epicurus had said: “We must not pretend to study philosophy but study it in reality, for it is not the appearance of health that we need but real health.” Health and justice are interesting words to compare with each other. Cicero seems, as he usually does, to imply that there is an absolute true form of justice. And of course that’s a big dispute. Epicurus says that justice is the same for all in the sense that it is an agreement not to harm or to be harmed, but that justice is not absolute and that in different contexts and circumstances what’s just for one person is not just for another.
And this bit about “the wandering fancies of other men” — Cicero talked before in this text about Epicurus placing justice in the rumors of the crowd or something. Again I don’t even know what he’s talking about in that passage. What’s clear is that the prick of the conscience is very much part of Epicurean justice. And it’s surprising to me that Cicero says “you wish us to disregard the firm ground of inner consciousness” — as if the Epicureans are saying to ignore your conscience. That’s not what they’re saying at all.
And then the thing is, Cicero — as we’ve said when we covered the previous section on justice in more detail — is completely muddled in his presentation of Epicurus on justice. He leaves out the origin of justice which is in agreements neither to harm nor to be harmed. And he likes to pretend that the only reason an Epicurean would ever act justly is for fear of being caught. A couple weeks ago I quoted Lucretius from Book Five on the origin of this stuff. Cicero glosses over it completely.
When you take the view that justice does not exist by natural law, that it doesn’t come from God, that it’s not written on our hearts — we make it up as we go along, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s probably better that we do. Because what we’re finding is that the laws that were supposedly written on the hearts of the Hebrews 2,500 years ago portray a society that, for many modern thinkers, looks absolutely barbaric compared to the society we actually live in. So it’s good that justice is something that we have to think about and argue about, that we have to state a case for.
Cassius:
That’s an excellent point, and that allusion to the two tablets from Mount Sinai leads us to the next sentence I’m looking at here. Cicero uses a different allusion in accusing the Epicureans of going wrong. He says: “And the statements made about the rest of the virtues whose foundations in every case you, the Epicureans, pitch upon pleasure as you might upon water.”
So he accuses the Epicureans of erecting the foundations of their morality not even on shifting sand but upon water — he calls pleasure “water,” nothing that can be built on. And that’s basically one of the ways to frame the whole issue. Do you build your foundations on what nature gives you through the feelings of pleasure and pain? Or do you build your foundations on some kind of an abstraction that you have wrecked for yourself using syllogisms, or ideas about supernatural gods, or ideas about ideal forms?
The Epicurean position that Torquatus is arguing is that nature gives us only pleasure and pain. And that if you’re going to look to nature for your foundation, you’re going to look to pleasure and pain. That’s what is given to you by nature. And that’s exactly what Torquatus has said. So when Cicero calls it water — well, it is the liquid of life, isn’t it? It’s what gives us our life. And it’s probably a better foundation than any abstraction.
Why don’t we bring today’s conversation to a conclusion and see if we have closing comments for today’s episode? Martin?
Martin:
No comment.
Cassius:
Alright, thank you Martin. Callistheni?
Callistheni:
Thank you. I enjoyed listening today and I have no other comments. Thank you.
Cassius:
Alright, thanks. Joshua?
Joshua:
Yeah, I don’t have much to say but I do want to pursue over time this line about comparing Cicero’s ideal society with Spartan society to see how they diverge, because it’s very different in a lot of ways. Rome is kind of a successor in some ways to the Spartan military ideal, but if virtue, if service to your country — if these things truly are the good — why not go full bore in the direction that Sparta went? That would kind of be my objection to some of what he’s saying, and I do want to pursue that further.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s a very good analogy, Joshua, and I hope we can pursue it because I do think it will lead to some interesting insights. Okay, well next week we’ll come back and continue with Cicero droning on about his examples of virtuous living and the heroes of the past, and we’ll deal with each of them and doggedly pursue Cicero to the very end of his argument, which is some weeks ahead of us even at this point. But we’ll get there, and I think we’re getting a lot of good information by going through the way Cicero is structuring these arguments.
So thanks for your time this week. As always, drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this podcast or any of our other activities or aspects of our group. Again, thanks for being with us. We’ll see you next week.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 211 of Lucretius Today. This is the podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
This week we’re continuing in Book 2 of Cicero’s On Ends and we’ll start our discussion today on page 58 of the Rackham edition starting at Roman numeral 21. Last week we devoted most of our time to discussing the argument in response to Torquatus who had said earlier in Book 1 that one of the ways you can prove that pleasure is the goal is to just think about the image of a life surrounded by all sorts of numerous and vivid pleasures with no fear of the gods, no fear of death, no fear of losing your pleasures. And just thinking about this image of such a life would automatically make it come to you how desirable this is. And then you can contrast it with the life of someone who is experiencing no pleasure, no hope of pleasure, nothing but pain and no hope for relief of pain, and probably is also concerned about hell, concerned about the gods, and just anxious about everything. Can you imagine anyone in a worse condition than such a person? And by just thinking about these images, it automatically persuades you — by the very act of thinking about them, it’s easy to see that the one life is highly desirable and really can’t be any better, and the second life of pain is the worst life and really can’t be any worse.
Well, last week we found in section 20 that Cicero is saying: you may think that’s a good argument, Torquatus, but I can think of two examples that are similar to what you’re talking about, but I don’t accept those as proof that pleasure is the good. Because I can think of Lucius Thorius Balbus, who not only was a happy, prosperous person, but also was someone who died for his country in battle — somebody who checked all the boxes of what many people think is the best life in terms of having all sorts of pleasures. And I can contrast that with Marcus Regulus, who was a consul who ended up being tortured to death because he was willing to stand by his word of honor. What Cicero says is: I can look at those two examples, Torquatus, and I do not want to be Lucius Thorius Balbus who had all the pleasures he wanted. I think that the right role model to follow is Marcus Regulus, who put his honor and virtue as his number one priority, regardless of the fact that he was tortured to death as a result of doing so. So your examples, Torquatus, do not mean anything to me. I say virtue is more important than pleasure.
So we get now to section 21. What Cicero says now is: you must either blame these examples, Torquatus, or you must abandon your advocacy of pleasure. What kind of advocacy is this? Or what sort of case can you make out for pleasure which will never be able to call witnesses either to fact or to character among men of distinction? He says: while we want to summon as our witnesses from the records of the past, men whose whole life was spent in noble exertion who would never be able to listen to the name of pleasure, on the other hand, in your debates, history is silent. I’ve never heard that in any discussion carried on by Epicurus the names of Lycurgus and Solon and Themistocles and people like that who are ever on the lips of all other philosophers. Is it not better to say something about men like that than to talk through such ponderous tomes about Themista, who was one of the female associates of the Epicurean garden? Let us allow such things to be characteristic of the Greeks, though it’s from them that we derive philosophy in all liberal arts, but there still are things which are not permitted to us, though permitted to the Greeks.
This is a point that you’ve talked about a lot, Joshua, over the last several weeks, but it’s worth emphasizing that in many ways Cicero’s argument always turns back to this desire to call as witnesses the men of distinction from the past, and expect us to accept that just because these men of distinction from the past have placed virtue in the center of their public actions — at any rate — and because they have allegedly been unwilling to listen to the name of pleasure, that just seals the deal for virtue being the highest good and pleasure being nowhere in the arena competing for the title.
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, one of the things that we keep dealing with is Cicero has a very clear idea of the Roman Republic, what it takes to maintain it, and what it exists for. And everything he talks about, really, I think is in service of that idea. So extolling the people who built the Republic, the people who sustained it in the face of adversity, that’s a major part of his project because it’s wrapped up in this whole package of: how are we going to raise the next generation of senators? How are we going to raise the next generation of consuls? What are we going to do if all these young people just turn to hedonistic pleasure-seeking and abandon politics and abandon warfare? So Cicero is very, very involved in this process. He spent most of his life in politics, served in battle also, and he admires people who did those things. He has a kind of distaste for people who didn’t do those things, which is fine.
But one thing I’ve been thinking about is there was a society in the ancient world who did all of this stuff to an extreme that probably even the Romans would have found a bit alarming. And that society was the Greek city-state of Sparta, which was a military state turned up to eleven. In Sparta, boys are taken from their mothers at the age of seven and they live in the barracks and they’re trained for the military. You have this rigid class society, which Cicero wouldn’t have had a problem with, of course, because he lived in a society with a rigid class system. But it’s clear to me, at least, when you push this stuff to the absolute extreme, it doesn’t paint a very good picture of society. And I don’t see Cicero pushing for this kind of a society, even though if you think that virtue is the good or virtue is the goal, this is kind of where that process would lead — to a society in which the freedom that Cicero values and that the Romans generally valued doesn’t really exist, because every person in the society is sort of a functionary of the military complex of the state.
Cassius: Right, and when Cicero was a young man and he was with his friends, he went to study under Greek tutors. Most of the Roman aristocratic youth at the time did exactly that. They either went to Greece to study under Greek tutors or they brought Greek tutors to Rome to teach them there, but it wasn’t to teach them the level of dedication to military pursuits that the Spartans were interested in. It was the Athenian ideal of education, of a love of beauty and so forth, and Cicero puts his love of virtue in exactly those terms. Virtue is the good because it is noble and beautiful and good in itself. That’s kind of his argument here. So I don’t see him extolling the Spartan way of living. But again he says there that some things are allowed to the Greeks that are not allowed to us. The book we’re reading is not the kind of book that a Spartan would have written because they weren’t focused on this kind of stuff. This is a very Athenian project to write this kind of dialogue.
As we begin to move on to the next paragraph, what Cicero is essentially doing — I wouldn’t necessarily call it the lemming theory of philosophy — but what we need to understand is the basis of his argument. He’s arguing from a sort of peer pressure type position. You should look to what other people have done. I’m not trying to tell you an argument about philosophy. I’m not trying to tell you what virtue is. I’m not trying to give you definitions or syllogisms or observations or anything like that about anything other than people. You’re supposed to look at what these other people have done and follow their lead — whether you understand it or not — is one way to describe what he’s arguing here.
Then he continues on in the next paragraph. He says: The Stoics were at war with the Peripatetics. One school declares there is nothing good but what is moral. The other assigns the highest, infinitely the highest, value to morality but that nevertheless there are some good things connected with our bodies and also some external to us. “What a moral debate! What a noble disagreement! In truth the whole struggle concerns the prestige of virtue.” And then: “but whatever you discuss with your fellow disciples, Torquatus, you must listen to much that concerns the impure pleasures of which Epicurus often speaks. Believe me then, Torquatus, you cannot maintain your own doctrines if you once gain a clear view of your own nature and your own thoughts and inclinations. You’ll blush, I say, for that picture which Cleanthes used to paint, certainly very neatly in his conversation. He bade his audience imagine to themselves pleasure painted in a picture as sitting on a throne with most lovely raiment and queenly apparel. The virtues near her as handmaidens with no other employment and no thought of other duty than to wait upon pleasure and merely to whisper in her ear, if only painting could convey such meaning, to guard against doing anything heedlessly which might wound men’s feelings or anything from which some pain might spring. And then we virtues indeed were born to be your thralls. We have no other function.”
So this is apparently a famous allusion that Cicero has recorded as Cleanthes the Stoic attempting to hold pleasure up to ridicule by saying that we should imagine a painting of pleasure on the throne of life and that the virtues — which really, according to Cicero and Cleanthes, should be on the throne — are nothing more than essentially slaves at the feet of pleasure. And this is supposed to be a picture that is so obnoxious and revolting that any person of good moral character is going to recoil at the very idea of thinking about it.
So Cicero is saying: Torquatus, you want me to think about a man who’s surrounded by all the pleasures of life and who thinks he doesn’t care about gods and death and who has no fear of pain now or in the future? I am telling you that image means nothing to me. The image that means something to me is to think about the virtues being slaves to pleasure. And I will put my image up against yours any day of the week, and mine is much more powerful — according to Cleanthes and Cicero here.
Joshua: Yeah, so Cleanthes was the successor of Zeno as head of the Stoic school in Athens, and his pupil was Chrysippus. So we’ve been talking a lot about Chrysippus lately. That’s kind of the succession there: Zeno, then Cleanthes, and then Chrysippus. And if you read A Few Days in Athens by Frances Wright, which is a fictional book that portrays Epicurus and his school in this time period, Zeno and Cleanthes figure as major characters in that book.
But the main disagreement — again we have to go back to this a little bit — is that what Epicurus wants out of philosophy and what Cicero wants out of philosophy are two very different things. Cicero’s aim is expressly political in philosophy. His aim is expressly oriented toward the world of action. But for Epicurus, this is not his view of things. His view of philosophy is that philosophy should be a cure for all of the afflictions that ail us in our minds. The fear of death, the fear of the intervention of supernatural gods, the fear of what comes after death. And so Epicurus coming onto this stage here doesn’t have much time, really, for the political side of things. But when it comes to making people, not just happy, but making people healthy in their minds, in the way they think, in the way they look at the world and at themselves, at their own mortality — his view on this is captured in his quote: “Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young, nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old, for no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.” That’s the project of Epicurean philosophy: the health of the soul. Cicero may have faced death very bravely, and good for him for doing that, but many people genuinely suffered — especially in the ancient world — from a fear of death, from a fear of what comes after death, and from fear of pain. This is a world without anesthetic; they didn’t have the medicines and the drugs that we have. And so Cicero and Epicurus in this text are just talking past one another, because Cicero has a very different standard for what philosophy should do than Epicurus.
So it’s no surprise that we find them at loggerheads here. And while the health of the soul is kind of the goal or the main reason that we pursue pleasure and avoid pain, the reason that we study nature and so forth, it’s also the reason that in this mental image that Cleanthes paints, the virtues are the servants or handmaidens of pleasure and not the other way around.
Cassius: Yeah, I think that’s a really key point there. And I know, Joshua, that you’re very much into the poetry, and we have other members of the Epicurean Friends group who are also into various forms of art. And I think it’s really interesting to dig into what it says about these opposing positions — that Cleanthes and Cicero are painting a picture of a particular type, versus a very different picture painted by Torquatus.
You made the comment a few minutes ago that what Epicurus and Torquatus are concerned about is real lives, the way things really are for real people. And the imagery that Torquatus was painting — presumably from the Epicurean standard arguments — is that you should imagine a person who is surrounded by all these pleasures and who is strong and independent and doesn’t fear supernatural gods or torture after death. The difference between that image and this image that Cleanthes is painting says an awful lot. Because it’s interesting to think about what Cleanthes thinks his painting appeals to that the Torquatus example does not.
The Torquatus example, I would say, appeals to your basic sense of pain and pleasure, your basic feelings given to you by nature, that everybody can identify with very viscerally, very bodily, without a lot of abstract thought about it. The picture painted by Cleanthes, on the other hand — it’s interesting to think about what it is that appeals to. Because you have to think about what it is that the virtues represent before you can even make any sense out of the image that Cleanthes is talking about. According to what Cicero says here: if you’ve got to imagine pleasure painted in a picture as sitting on a throne with lovely raiment and queenly apparel, I would presume that means that pleasure is being portrayed in a very attractive way, and the virtues are being portrayed as handmaidens with no other employment or thought of duty than waiting upon pleasure and catering to every need. I don’t know that a painting like that necessarily conveys anything to somebody who doesn’t come to looking at that painting with a preconceived notion that virtue should never be placed in such a role. He’s not really saying that the virtues are being portrayed in rags or as enslaved — he’s not saying anything about the way they’re portrayed other than that they are waiting on the person sitting on the throne, who is pleasure.
So if I were from some South Pacific island and I saw such a picture, I’m not sure I’d make any sense out of it at all without having been previously indoctrinated from the viewpoint of Cleanthes or Cicero about virtue — which, as Epicurus says, is sort of an empty word without meaning unless you identify it with pain and pleasure. What any of that picture that Cleanthes has painted would even mean, I do think, is one of the big things we need to be getting out of going through all of Cicero’s On Ends: to look behind what’s being said and to think about what the argument is being based on. What is Cleanthes appealing to, and why does he think his painting should have any impact at all?
Joshua: He’s appealing, I think, to the long-standing practice of mockery which was leveled toward the Epicureans. That’s kind of what I see here. Before I go into that, let me say this: in the time of Caesar in Rome, there was a temple of Venus Genetrix that was dedicated to the goddess on September 26th of 46 BC by Julius Caesar. That would be kind of the image of pleasure, right — Venus or Aphrodite sitting on a throne. So if you’re looking for a visual cue, that’s kind of where I would go for that.
That’s a really good point. And Julius Caesar’s family played up the connection really heavily. The family claimed that they were the descendants of Venus, so there was definitely a personal connection tying him in with the goddess herself. So that was a big part of it.
But as I said, I think mockery is a huge part of this. There’s a lot of really interesting material on this subject. The statue of Chrysippus in the Cerameicus, holding out his hand — that’s kind of a mocking response to Epicurean philosophy. But it doesn’t really stop there. Cleanthes and his mental painting is meant to mock the Epicureans, but also to arouse the contempt of the virtue-seeking philosophers in his time. But all the way right up until the Renaissance, mockery becomes a really important approach to the philosophy.
For example, if you look at Lucian of Samosata’s Alexander the Oracle Monger — which was addressed to his friend Celsus — he describes the oracle Alexander piling Epicurus’s books up on a kind of plinth or altar in the town square, lecturing the people against the Epicureans: “Don’t let these people in your homes! Don’t do trade with these people, because they’ve annoyed the god!” And in the end he burned those books and threw them into the Black Sea. So mockery once again.
And then one of my favorite examples of this comes in the Renaissance. There was a Dominican friar named — forgive my pronunciation here — Girolamo Savonarola, who in 1494 kind of took control of the city of Florence. He expelled the Medicis and he instituted a puritanical religious reign in which he would give public sermons. There would be bonfires, and people would bring things from their homes to throw into the bonfires — things like art, books, cosmetics, mirrors, statuary, sculptures — all this really good stuff — and they were burning it all because it had distracted them from their religion. And in 1497 he gave a sermon in Lent ranting against the ancient philosophers and their followers. And this is kind of a section of what he had to say about the Epicureans: “Listen, women! They say that this world was made of atoms — that is, those tiniest particles that fly through the air. Now laugh, women, at the studies of these learned men!” So mockery once again becomes a huge part of how people respond to a philosophy that is really appealing to a lot of people when it’s allowed to be presented freely in public, which it very seldom has been throughout history.
Cassius: That’s a really interesting direction there, Joshua. I’m curious whether there are any elements of what makes for mockery and how mockery is constructed. It occurs to me to ask whether mockery often involves isolating some one aspect of a thing apart from its full context, and thereby taking it out of context and holding it up to ridicule. Taking it out of context makes it easier to ridicule something rather than when seen in the full context of its original setting. Is there anything that jumps out at you about what makes effective mockery that would be useful to talk about that would apply here to what Cleanthes is doing?
Joshua: Yeah, I think you’re onto something there, which is that you isolate an attribute of what you’re trying to mock, you exaggerate it out of all proportion, and then you just go in relentlessly on it and you kind of egg on the public to join in on the joke. You know, when you can’t just outright kill someone, when you can’t just outright burn their books or prevent people from reading them, what you can do is basically public ridicule as the response. And we’re very, very familiar with this in the age of the internet — in fact it’s become a real problem. I think there was a book called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed that was really big a couple of years ago.
But it’s exactly that kind of thing. In Britain today they still do this. They have Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night, on the 5th of November. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic seditionist who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament — or at least the House of Lords; I’m not sure — they were going to assassinate the Protestant King James the First and his Parliament. And so every year he is burned in effigy.
Cassius: Remind us, Joshua, of the poem that goes with it, that supposedly every English schoolchild was taught.
Joshua: Oh yeah: “Remember, remember the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot! I know of no reason the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot.”
Cassius: And of course I know that from V for Vendetta.
Joshua: Exactly where I saw it. Exactly — I would not have known it otherwise.
But so mockery: it’s very effective, and even in the ancient world philosophers were relentlessly mocked — not just the Epicureans but philosophers in general. Socrates was mocked heavily in some of the comic playwrights’ works. Philosophers were seen as these kind of dopey people who always had their head in the clouds. They would be looking up at the stars and then they’d fall into a well, and some peasant girl would walk by and laugh at them because they can’t even see where they’re going. So it’s very effective, it’s a very long-standing tradition, and Epicurus comes in for it particularly more than most.
Cassius: Yes, and that’s what Cicero does as he continues into section 22 here. Cicero says: “Oh, but Epicurus says — and this is indeed your strong point, Torquatus — that no one can live agreeably who does not live morally.” As though I gave any heed to what Epicurus affirms or denies! “The question I ask,” Cicero says, “is what statement is consistent for a man to make who builds his highest good upon pleasure? What do you allege to show that Thorius, that Furius, that Postumus and the master of all these men, Orata, did not live very agreeable lives? He himself, as I mentioned already, asserts that the life of profligates is not worthy of blame unless they are utterly foolish — that is, unless they are subject to passion and fear. And when he proffers a remedy for both these conditions, he proffers immunity to profligacy. For if these two conditions are removed, he says that he finds nothing to blame in the life of profligates. You cannot, therefore, while guiding all actions by pleasure, either defend or maintain virtue.”
Yeah — Cicero affirms or denies about virtue and pleasure. This is kind of funny to me, but he’s summing up all of the old stories that we’ve already gone through — Lucius Thorius Balbus, some of these other names — and of that list, Joshua, I see that he says that the master of all of those men was Orata. I don’t think I recognize that name.
Joshua: Well, I see on the Wikipedia page here, Cassius, that he was kind of an interesting guy. He was a merchant, an inventor, and a hydraulic engineer — if such a thing could really exist in the ancient world. He was the one who developed the cultivation of oyster beds, which is always associated with luxurious dining, and designed the hypocaust method of heating a building. With the hypocaust method, there are sort of vents or channels under the floor of the house, and that space is heated so the heat rises up into the home and also allows for heated water for bathing. Why Cicero brings him up in this context I’m not entirely sure. It looks like he was a major figure in the Roman resort and spa town of Baiae. There are some accusations that he was evading taxes using the public water for his business, and he was building luxury villas. The last line here on Wikipedia says: “Sergius Orata became rich, and was himself noted for his love of luxury and refinement.” So I guess that’s why Cicero is bringing him up here as the king of them all or something.
Cassius: Yeah — and I can speculate as to one other connection. If you follow the Wikipedia entry and see the Sergius family, it says that the Sergius family was extremely distinguished and dated back almost to the founding of the Republic. But it says despite long and distinguished service, toward the end of the Republic the reputation of the family suffered as a result of the Catiline conspiracy. So if the Orata name got associated with the Catiline conspiracy, that of course was one of the major events of Cicero’s life where he got into a lot of trouble, and eventually all sorts of bad things came from the Catiline conspiracy.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s the fastest way to put Cicero’s nose out of joint — to be associated with that historical event. So that’s interesting. But at any rate, it is interesting that Cicero would explain that “as though I gave any heed to what Epicurus affirms or denies” — he’s certainly giving some heed to what Epicurus says because he’s writing a whole book against Epicurus! So it’s kind of an interesting exclamation there.
Cassius: But again, in this section what Cicero is doing is he’s holding Epicurus up to ridicule by isolating out this alleged focus on sex, drugs, and rock and roll as being what Epicurus thinks life is all about. Cicero has repeatedly refused to give consideration to Epicurus’ expansion of the definition of pleasure to include all of these other activities of life — which Thorius and Furius and Postumus and Orata were doing — which were not disreputable and not things that anyone would criticize, even Cicero himself. Even talking about Thorius, who had given his life in battle for his country. You can put pleasure on the throne of the supreme good, and as long as you understand pleasure properly and pursue it properly, with the proper definition and understanding of what pleasure in life really is, then you’re perfectly fine. But Cicero just refuses to allow that kind of an argument, and he’s just mocking everybody associated with Epicurus.
And so Cicero says: “For a man who refrains from injustice only to avoid evil must not be considered a good and just man. You know of course the saying, ‘No one is righteous whose righteousness…’ — there are three dots that tail off — ‘will never suppose that any saying is truer. He is not indeed a just man so long as his fear lasts, and assuredly he will not be so if he ceases to fear — while he will cease to fear if he is able to conceal or by the aid of great resources to secure anything he has done. And will undoubtedly choose to be regarded as a good man though not really so, rather than to be good without being considered good. So you most disgracefully enjoin and press upon us in a kind of way a pretense of justice in the place of the true and indubitable justice. You wish us to disregard the firm ground of inner consciousness and to catch at the wandering fancies of other men.’”
That’s probably a good place for us to begin to close for today. But when Cicero says “so you most disgracefully enjoin and press upon us in a kind of way a pretense of justice in the place of the true and indubitable justice” — that’s kind of an echo of Vatican Saying 54, where Epicurus had said: “We must not pretend to study philosophy but study it in reality, for it is not the appearance of health that we need but real health.” Health and justice are interesting words to compare with each other. I think we can understand very easily what health is for living things. Justice is much more difficult. But Cicero seems, as he usually does, to imply that there is an absolute true form of justice. And of course that’s a big dispute. Epicurus says that justice is the same for all in the sense that it is an agreement not to harm or be harmed, but that justice is not absolute, and that in different contexts and circumstances, what’s just for one person is not just for another. So you have again this echo of an argument between an absolutist view of life versus a view of nature in which there’s not an absolute supreme being telling you what’s right and what’s wrong.
Joshua: The thing is, Cicero, as we’ve said when we covered the previous section on justice in more detail, is completely muddled in his presentation of Epicurus on justice. He leaves out the origin of justice, which is in agreements neither to harm nor to be harmed, agreements for mutual advantage and so forth, and he likes to pretend — as I’m about to quote here — that the only reason an Epicurean would ever act justly is for fear of being caught. That’s kind of his belief. This is obviously not true. There are a whole lot of reasons that one might act justly. The prick of the conscience is certainly part of it, which is why it’s surprising to me that Cicero says here: “You wish us to disregard the firm ground of inner consciousness and to catch at the wandering fancies of other men.” If that’s not the worst description of Epicurus on justice that’s ever been written, I don’t know what is. The prick of the consciousness is very much part of it. And this bit about “the wandering fancies of other men” — he talked before, Cassius, in this text about the rumblings of the crowd, or something like “Epicurus places justice in the rumors of the crowd.” I don’t even know what he’s talking about in that passage.
And we’re kind of having the same thing here, which is that it’s not that justice shouldn’t be extolled, but you extoll it within the proper context, which is: it arises out of a desire among primitive humans not to be killed and not to kill other people, to protect their children. So they make agreements with one another. That’s where all this stuff starts. A couple weeks ago I quoted Lucretius from Book 5 on the origin of this stuff, but Cicero glosses over it completely.
When you take that view that justice does not exist by natural law — as Cicero says in his Tusculan Disputations, it doesn’t come from God, it’s not written on our hearts; we make it up as we go along — and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s probably better that we do, because what we’re finding is that the laws that were written on the hearts of the Hebrews 2,500 years ago, the society that portrays, for many modern thinkers, looks absolutely barbaric compared to the society we actually live in. So it’s good that justice is something that we have to think about and argue about, that we have to state a case for, and not just default back to the two tablets brought down from Mount Sinai.
Cassius: That’s an excellent point. And that allusion to the two tablets from Mount Sinai leads us to the next sentence that I’m looking at here right after what you just quoted. People who talk about the two tablets from Mount Sinai often use another allusion about what kind of foundation you’ve built your life on — they talk about shifting sands as a poor way to build the foundations of your life. Cicero uses a different allusion here in accusing the Epicureans of going wrong. He says: “And the statements made about the rest of the virtues whose foundations in every case you, the Epicureans, pitch upon pleasure as you might upon water.”
So he accuses the Epicureans of erecting the foundations of their morality, not even on shifting sand, but upon water. He calls pleasure water — nothing that can be built on. And that’s basically one of the ways to frame the whole issue. Do you build your foundations on what nature gives you through the feelings of pleasure and pain? Or do you build your foundations on some kind of an abstraction that you have erected for yourself using syllogisms or ideas about supernatural gods or ideal forms or other things like that? The Epicurean position that Torquatus is arguing is that nature gives us only pleasure and pain. And that if you’re going to look to nature for your foundation, you’re going to look to pleasure and pain.
Why don’t we bring today’s conversation to a conclusion and see if we have closing comments for today’s episode? Martin?
Martin: No comment.
Cassius: Alright, thank you Martin. Callistheni?
Callistheni: Thank you. I enjoyed listening today and I have no other comments.
Cassius: Alright, thanks. Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, I don’t have much to say, but I do want to pursue over time this line about comparing Cicero’s ideal society with Spartan society to see how they diverge, because it’s very different in a lot of ways. Rome is kind of a successor in some ways to the Spartan military ideal, but if virtue, if service to your country — if these things truly are the good — why not go full bore in the direction that Sparta went? So that would kind of be my objection to some of what he’s saying, and I do want to pursue that further.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s a very good analogy, Joshua, and I hope we can pursue it because I do think it will lead to some interesting insights. Okay, well next week we’ll come back and continue with Cicero droning on about his examples of virtuous living and the heroes of the past, and we’ll deal with each of them and doggedly pursue Cicero to the very end of his argument, which is some weeks ahead of us even at this point. But we’ll get there, and I think we’re getting a lot of good information by going through the way Cicero is structuring these arguments. So thanks for your time this week. As always, drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this podcast or any of our other activities or aspects of our group. Again, thanks for being with us. We’ll see you next week.