Episode 287 - TD17 - The Fear of Pain Is Overrated, But Cicero and Epicurus Disagree As To Why.
Date: 06/21/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4510-episode-287-td17-the-fear-of-pain-is-overrated-but-cicero-and-epicurus-disagree/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This episode completes the reading and discussion of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations Book Two, covering sections 25–27 and then offering an extended summary of Cicero’s overall argument about bodily pain.
Section 25 presents two contrasting Stoic responses to pain. Dionysius of Heraclea — a student of Zeno the Stoic — abandoned his Stoicism when struck with severe kidney pain, crying out that everything he had formerly believed about pain was false. When his fellow disciple Cleanthes challenged him, Dionysius replied that the very fact that a man who had devoted so many years to philosophy could not bear pain was itself proof that pain is an evil. Cleanthes rebuked him by stamping his foot and reciting a verse from the tragedy Epigone — “Hear me, thou below, thou glorious one” — invoking Zeno’s spirit. In contrast, Posidonius, when Pompey visited him at Rhodes during a severe attack of gout, insisted on lecturing from his bed, repeatedly crying out during his pangs, “Pain, it is to no purpose — notwithstanding you are troublesome, I will never acknowledge you an evil.”
Section 26 argues that the desire for glory and honor motivates the endurance of pain — Scipio Africanus often quoted Xenophon’s maxim that honor makes labor lighter for a general than for a common soldier. Joshua offers an extended digression on Xenophon’s Anabasis — the account of the march of ten thousand Greek mercenaries through Persian territory after the Battle of Cunaxa — and Xenophon’s famous episode of dismounting, loading a struggling soldier onto his horse, and marching on foot himself. Joshua also uses Thoreau’s essay on John Brown to illuminate Cicero’s method: just as Thoreau judges John Brown by a handpicked jury of admirable men rather than the craven multitude, Cicero appeals to his own imagined jury of Marcus Regulus, Scipio, Epaminondas, and other heroes rather than to public opinion.
Section 27 closes Cicero’s argument: the same virtue and reason must be applied consistently to all types of pain, not only military wounds. Greeks bear sickness manfully but avoid battle; Cimbrians and Celtiberians are fierce in battle but cannot endure sickness. Nothing can be consistent that does not have reason for its foundation. Cicero concludes that whether pain is called an evil or not, virtue can overcome it — and adds an allusion to God’s protection: like a dolphin carrying Arion of Methymna or Neptune’s horses bearing Pelops, a divine refuge is always available. The student declares himself freed from the fear of both death and pain; the dialogue closes with arrangements for the next day’s sessions.
The episode concludes with a summary discussion. Both Cassius and Joshua note that many of Cicero’s practical conclusions about bearing pain are in fact consistent with Epicurus — that pain is generally manageable, that the mind can diminish or enlarge it, and that we must not let fear of pain dominate our decisions. The fundamental divergence lies in Cicero’s foundation: his appeal to a transcendent natural moral law vindicated by supernatural gods. Cassius invokes Nietzsche’s critique of the Stoics projecting their own values onto nature, and argues that this false foundation left Roman civilization unable to resist the influx of eastern monotheism — whereas Epicurean philosophy, which Cicero was positioned to embrace through his friendship with Atticus, his contact with Siro and other Epicureans, and his brother Quintus’s reading of Lucretius, would have provided a far more durable basis.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 287 of Lucretius Today. This is a 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 this study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. Today we’re closing in on the end of the discussion of whether pain is an evil or not. Last week we focused on Cicero’s argument that we should all face pain like a man, using reason to look to nature and see that nature herself approves of the manly ability to bear pain without wailing or excessive lamentation. In that discussion, Cicero focused much of his attention on analogies from soldiers and the military world.
This week, Cicero is going to turn his attention to the examples of several philosophers or wise men who are facing pain who are not in the military context, and then he’ll summarize his argument as he reaches the end of this part two, which we will complete today because we’re almost there. Now, what we’ll do today though is let’s go ahead and go through the new material starting in section 25, and then when we reach the end of these sections, we will come back and summarize and comment on Cicero’s general argument that he’s been making throughout this part two and try to bring it home before we move into part three. So Joshua, if you would take us forward speaking for Cicero in section 25.
Joshua: You may ask how the case is in peace, what is to be done at home, how we are to behave in bed. You bring me back to the philosophers who seldom go to war. Among these, Dionysius of Heraclea, a man certainly of no resolution, having learned fortitude of Zeno, acquitted it on being in pain; for being tormented with a pain in his kidneys, in wailing himself he cried out that those things were false which he had formerly conceived of pain, and when his fellow disciple Cleanthes asked him why he had changed his opinion, he answered that the case of any man who had applied so much time to philosophy and yet was unable to bear pain might be a sufficient proof that pain is an evil; that he himself had spent many years at philosophy and yet could not bear pain; it followed therefore that pain was an evil.
It is reported that Cleanthes stamped his foot on the ground and repeated a verse out of Epigone, “Hear me, thou below, thou glorious one,” invoking Zeno with this line. He was sorry the other man had degenerated from him. But it was not so with our friend Posidonius, whom I have often seen myself, and I will tell you what Pompey used to say of him — that when he came to Rhodes after his departure from Syria, he had a great desire to hear Posidonius, but was informed that he was very ill of a severe fit of the gout. Yet he had great inclination to pay a visit to so famous a philosopher. Accordingly, when he had seen him and paid his compliments and had spoken with great respect of him, he said he was very sorry that he could not hear him lecture. But indeed you may, replied the other, nor will I suffer any bodily pain to occasion so great a man to visit me in vain. On this, Pompey relates that as he lay on his bed, he disputed with great dignity and fluency on this very subject, that nothing was good but what was honest, and that in his pains he would often say, “Pain, it is to no purpose. Notwithstanding you are troublesome, I will never acknowledge you an evil,” and in general all celebrated and notorious afflictions became endurable by disregarding them.
Cassius: Thank you Joshua for reading that first section there. I don’t want to pass over this without commenting to make sure people understand that what Cicero is giving us here is an example of a conflict within the Stoic school. Posidonius, whom he cites as an example of someone who even when he’s in the greatest pain is going to say, “Pain, I will never acknowledge you an evil” — and saying that in general all notorious afflictions become endurable by disregarding them — well, some Stoics apparently are able to do that, and Cleanthes apparently thinks that all Stoics should be able to do that, because he’s going to stamp his foot on the ground as if calling Zeno himself — Zeno the Stoic — to take notice of this terrible person, Dionysius of Heraclea, who claimed to be a Stoic but who did not believe that his Stoicism in the end was the proper answer. Because Dionysius of Heraclea, having learned fortitude from Zeno the Stoic himself, eventually gave up his Stoicism because when tormented with kidney pain — the same kind that Epicurus had apparently — gave in to crying out about his pain and saying that those things were false which he had formally conceived of pain.
And Dionysius gave a very good answer. When Cleanthes challenged him, Dionysius said that any man who has spent so much time at philosophy as he himself had, and yet was unable to bear pain as he himself was finding, that itself is sufficient proof that pain is an evil. With all the years he had spent at philosophy himself, he could not bear pain and therefore had to acknowledge that it was evil. That position ultimately ends up being fairly close to what Cicero’s position is — that regardless of whether we want to characterize pain as evil, regardless of whether we want to say that we are indifferent and we can disregard pain, it makes no sense just to try to deal with it by defining it away and trying to minimize it through definitions as opposed to a much more persuasive argument. So Cicero is now going to proceed in section 26 and tell us what he thinks is a more persuasive argument. So Joshua, if you could read section 26.
Joshua: Do we not observe that where those exercises called gymnastic are in esteem, those who enter the lists never concern themselves about dangers; that where the praise of riding and hunting is highly esteemed, they who practice these arts decline no pain? What shall I say of our own ambitious pursuits or desire of honors? What fire have not candidates run through to gain a single vote? Therefore Africanus had always in his hands Xenophon, the pupil of Socrates, being particularly pleased with his saying that the same labors were not equally heavy to the general and to the common man, because the honor itself made the labor lighter to the general. But yet so it happens that even with the illiterate vulgar, an idea of honor is of great influence; though they cannot understand what it is, they are led by report and common opinion to look on that as honorable which has the general voice.
Not that I would have you, should the multitude be ever so fond of you, rely on their judgment, nor approve of everything which they think right. You must use your own judgment. If you are satisfied with yourself when you have approved of what is right, you will not only have the mastery over yourself, which I recommended to you just now, but over everybody and everything. Lay this down then as a rule: that a great capacity and lofty elevation of soul, which distinguishes itself most by despising and looking down with contempt on pain, is the most excellent of all things — and the more so if it does not depend on the people and does not aim at applause, but derives its satisfaction from itself. Besides, to me indeed everything seems the more commendable, the less the people are courted and the fewer eyes there are to see it. Not that you should avoid the public for every generous action, for every generous action loves the public view; yet no theater for virtue is equal to a consciousness of it.
Cassius: Joshua, we discussed some of this last week. I see this as Cicero being very inconsistent in his arguments, because again he’s usually pointing to great men of the past as an example of how we should live our lives today. But here he’s admitting that I don’t want you to look to what the general voice is, what the general public often wants. You should look inside yourself. Apparently this issue of looking through reason to nature is going to tell you that honor and lofty elevation of the soul is the most excellent of all things. So again, I would say the logical problem in Cicero’s argument is that he is contradicting himself by citing all of these men of the past and saying that their example is what should be followed, and yet how are we to pick out which of the men of the past to consider to be great?
Not everybody makes the same decisions about dealing with pain or dealing with most other decisions in life. Cicero is selectively picking out the ones that he says we should consider to be great, and at the same time deprecating and criticizing the general judgment of the public because it’s generally wrong, Cicero is implying. So I think there’s a great inconsistency here that undercuts his argument and lays it bare that when you look to nature and say that nature has your own conclusion in mind, this is what Nietzsche talks about when he criticizes the Stoics — they are taking their own Stoicism and projecting it onto nature as if they themselves know better than nature what the right way of conduct is in a particular situation. Rather than taking nature’s guidance through pleasure and pain, they project their own concepts, their own idealism onto nature and expect you to believe that that makes sense. And it simply does not make sense.
Joshua: Yeah, you’re right Cassius, we did talk about this last week. Last week I sort of gave a devil’s advocate defense of Cicero by saying that even though he’s talking about reputation and fame and honor and esteem and so on, what he’s really appealing to there is his view that there is this sort of transcendent moral law that exists in nature and that we can discover that, and that by aligning ourselves with that we escape the slavish devotion to the opinions of the multitude — which Cicero himself accuses Epicurus, as I said last week, of explaining or defining justice on the basis of the opinions of the multitude. Now, that is not true. But I think you’re right, Cassius, to say that Cicero is setting himself up here for a dilemma when he says that honor and esteem and fame and reputation and so on — that these are not only many words to refer to one chief good; these represent the only good.
That was a quote from last week from Cicero: that whatever you want to call it — if you want to call it virtue, if you want to call it honor, if you want to call it moral excellence — when he’s praising men like Marcus Regulus and Scipio Africanus, he is praising them for this quality, and this quality of estimable moral behavior is the only good for Cicero. It’s the only good for Cicero. I think I can make a second devil’s advocate argument in defense of his position here, because I think you’re right — he does seem to be setting himself up for using the opinion of the multitude, of the populace, of the loudest voice essentially, to determine what is moral and what is not. Of course, Cicero would say that that’s not what he’s doing here. In fact, he’s at the end of this very section disavowing that view entirely. He says, “To me indeed everything seems the more commendable, the less the people are courted.”
And what I think of here is an essay that was written by Henry David Thoreau in the years leading up to the American Civil War about an acquaintance of his named John Brown — that name will be familiar to some who are interested in American history. John Brown was an abolitionist and a firebrand. He had seen conflict in the border skirmishes in bleeding Kansas and so on. He devised a strategy to take on the institution of slavery in a much more direct and straightforward way. The plan he came up with was: we’re going to raid the government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia; we’re going to take the arms; we’re going to put them in the hands of the men that we liberate; and as we move south that band is going to keep on growing until eventually we’ve taken over the whole region.
What actually happened is that he managed to get into the arsenal but was captured. And Thoreau, who was a great admirer of John Brown, contrasts the general opinion of that incident at the time with his own opinion, which is full of admiration. So he says this in that essay, “The Last Days of John Brown”: “On the whole, my respect for my fellow men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor — one of unusual pluck, as the governor of Virginia is reported to have said — had been caught and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. It turns all sweetness I have to gall to hear of the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that he died as the fool dieth — which, pardon me for an instant, suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, hard-hearted, said disparagingly that he threw his life away because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray? Such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers? I hear another ask, Yankee-like, ‘What will he gain by it?’ as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a surprise party, if he does not get a new pair of boots or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. But he won’t gain anything by it. Well, no, I don’t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hanged, take the year round. But then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul — and such a soul as you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a cord of wood than for a cord of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.”
Full of venom and admiration for John Brown. And I think that Cicero, when he’s looking at the great men of the past, he’s doing what Thoreau is doing here. He is saying that the multitude can be craven and debased because they do not understand virtue and moral excellence and honor. But when I take my own actions and my own opinions and my own behaviors to court to defend myself, I do not take it to the court of public opinion. What Cicero is saying is that he has a jury handpicked of Marcus Regulus, Scipio, Epaminondas, Dionysius — all of these great figures that he cites all the time. He is taking his case to an imagined jury of those figures and saying that this is how I’m going to judge my conduct. It’s got nothing to do with the multitude; it’s got nothing to do with the crowd. It is a select group of heroes that I am specifically appealing to, and if nobody else understands that, that’s fine, because it’s enough that I understand it — it’s enough that I understand it and I know that they would have as well.
That’s a slightly different argument than the one I made last week. Thoreau, by the way, ends this passage by saying: “Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that in the moral world when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality that it does not ask our leave to germinate.” It is precisely those heroes that Cicero is appealing to when he says that moral excellence, virtue, honor, esteem — that these are the things he holds dear, and it is to them that he goes for his final appeal in defending his own choices and his own behavior. So again, all I’m saying here is that Cicero — even though we see a contradiction here, Cassius — Cicero is essentially setting up the populace, the multitude, as the judge of honor and virtue. What Cicero thinks is that that is not the market that he is carrying his blood to. He is carrying himself to a very different market and to a very different courtroom. And so I think that’s the argument that we really have to find a way to deal with.
Cassius: Joshua, that is a great example and tells me that you’re really getting into character here in reading the parts from Cicero. Because what you’re referring to from Thoreau I think is exactly what Cicero is doing, and it’s an important question — it’s an emotional question, it’s an emotional appeal that we need to be able to understand and dissect so we can take it apart and decide whether it’s valid or not. Now as you indicated, most people today are not particularly familiar with the story of John Brown. They can go to Wikipedia and look it up, or they can look up a movie from the 1940s — I think there’s one called Santa Fe Trail, which I have watched many times, and it’s with Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Raymond Massey, and it describes the background of the John Brown episode and how it definitely does constitute a tragic or heroic tale, depending on how you look at it, of a man who finds slavery so abhorrent that he is going to finally just take matters in his own hands and start his own revolution if necessary in order to get rid of slavery.
Now, I’m not going to go down the road of evaluating the morality of the particular people who are involved in that particular instance. You can argue both sides about whether a violent revolution to get rid of a terrible evil is the best course of action or not, and I think the Santa Fe Trail movie does a very good job of making John Brown look good at the same time questioning some of his decisions and setting up the dilemma that you face in judging whether something is worth doing or not when the stakes are extremely high. That’s what Cicero is appealing to in general. He is telling you that you can look to nature and nature will tell you herself whether a particular action at a particular time is heroic or not, whether it’s base or not, and he’s applying that to pain and telling you that nature herself is going to tell you that all pain should be disregarded, and whether you consider it to be evil or not, you should face it like a man and face it down and do what you think is right regardless of the consequences in pain.
And there are example after example. Cicero has his Roman background. We can name all sorts of people from the more recent past who we consider to be heroic versus those that we consider to be base and evil. But the choice and the judgment of whether a particular person at a particular time is heroic or evil is not something that I think Epicurus would say nature is going to tell you herself. It is about as core as anything else to Epicurean philosophy that nature gives you only pleasure and pain by which to decide what to choose and what to avoid. And definitely we can look at figures of great importance in the past and decide whether their actions bring us pleasure or bring us pain, and we make our decisions accordingly. And I would side with Thoreau and Cicero on the issue that when you think something is extremely important to you and it’s going to bring you emotional satisfaction, then you make your decisions and set your course based on which of those courses — which of those people you’re evaluating — are going to bring you the greatest pleasure over pain, the greatest happiness over unhappiness.
The problem with Cicero’s outlook is that he is simply saying that it’s self-evident if you look to nature that nature is going to answer those questions for you. And Epicurus, I think, is saying: not so, Stoics. You are projecting your preferences onto nature and trying to convince other people that nature herself justifies your particular cause — when nature does not even know about your cause and has no intention of supporting you in your decisions and saying that you were right versus someone else’s wrong. In the context of the John Brown situation which arose in the history of the war between the states, I’m reminded that the South took as its motto Deo vindice — often translated as “vindicated by God.” Well, that’s the root of the problem here that applies to Cicero and all of these other philosophers who are saying that there is a God over nature who justifies certain conclusions. That simply is not the case, and the argument ultimately becomes a way of manipulating people rather than a way of getting at the truth. Because the truth, as Epicurus says, is that there are no supernatural gods involved in the affairs of men, and nature herself has given you only pleasure and pain by which to make decisions on how to live.
Joshua: There is something else that Cicero mentions here in section 26 that I find interesting. He says, “Therefore Africanus had always in his hands Xenophon, the pupil of Socrates, being particularly pleased with his saying that the same labors were not equally heavy to the general and to the common man, because the honor itself made the labor lighter to the general.” I’m going to take this opportunity to recommend a book from the ancient world. One of the greatest adventure stories from the ancient world is by Xenophon, and it’s called the Anabasis — anabasis, meaning “the march upcountry” in Greek. Xenophon was a soldier in a Greek mercenary army that was hired by the heir to the Persian throne, Cyrus the Younger, unwittingly in an attempt to overthrow his older brother. And when the expedition failed — they were victorious in the battle at the field of Cunaxa outside of Babylon, but they were stuck deep in Persian terrain — they had to force-march north to the Black Sea, to the Pontus as it was known in the Greek world, to find the Greek city-states, the colonies on the south coast of the Black Sea, so they could catch a ship to get back home.
And Xenophon was not a general until a parley was called and the actual generals were murdered under flag of truce, at which point the soldiers of each Greek city-state that was represented elected their own generals to decide what to do next. And Xenophon was elected as one of the generals from the city-state of Athens. So he was promoted — he got a field promotion from his peers — and organized this march north up to the Black Sea. And there’s one particular story which I think Cicero might have had in mind when he wrote this line. Xenophon was leading the army over a mountain pass and it was really, really cold — snow on the ground — and soldiers are dropping around him. He’s got this particularly memorable episode in the book that he wrote to celebrate his own exploits: he jumps off his horse, picks one of these guys up, shoves him on his horse, and marches with the guy’s pack to get over the mountain. This idea that if you think I have it easy just because I’m on a horse and you’re walking — why don’t I put you on the horse? And what we’re going to find is that because of my discipline and because of the honor of my position as a general, I’m going to show you that even on foot I’m going to out-march you. So it’s a very self-congratulatory account of this episode by Xenophon, but it’s a great story and it’s full of exactly the kind of thing that Cicero loves to talk about, which is these acts of heroism from the Greeks and the Romans.
Cassius: That’s another great example, Joshua. And certainly the example of Xenophon in that situation does evoke tremendous admiration and emotion in support of Xenophon’s actions. But the Epicurean analysis of that would be that the pleasure that it brings in realizing that this is a person who’s showing you how you can confront pain in order to achieve a goal of greater pleasure — that’s exactly what Epicurus tells us to do in the Letter to Menoeceus. Sometimes we’re going to consider the pain to be good and sometimes we’re going to consider the pleasure to be bad. It all depends on the outcome of our actions as to how we judge something. So I do think that’s a great example, and thank you for explaining what Cicero meant probably in section 26 there. Okay, the final section is 27, and if we’re ready, let’s go forward with that.
Joshua: And let this be principally considered: that this bearing of pain, which I have often said is to be strengthened by an exertion of the soul, should be the same in everything. For you meet with many who, through a desire of victory or for glory or to maintain their rights or their liberty, have boldly received wounds and borne themselves up under them; and yet those very same persons, by relaxing the intenseness of their minds, were unequal to bearing the pain of a disease — for they did not support themselves under their former sufferings by reason or philosophy, but by inclination and glory. Therefore some barbarians and savage people are able to fight very stoutly with the sword but cannot bear sickness like men; but the Grecians — men of no great courage, but as wise as human nature will admit of — cannot look an enemy in the face, yet the same will bear to be visited with sickness tolerably and with a sufficiently manly spirit. And the Cimbrians and the Celtiberians are very alert in battle but bemoan themselves in sickness, for nothing can be consistent which has not reason for its foundation.
But when you see those who are led by inclination or opinion neither hindered by pain in their pursuits nor from succeeding in them, you may conclude either that pain is no evil, or that notwithstanding you may choose to call an evil whatever is disagreeable and contrary to nature, yet it is so very trifling an evil that it may so effectually be got the better of by virtue as quite to disappear. And I would have you think of this night and day, for this argument will spread itself and take up more room sometime or other, and not be confined to pain alone. For if the motives to all our actions are to avoid disgrace and acquire honor, we may not only despise the stings of pain but the storms of fortune — especially if we have recourse to that retreat which was pointed out in yesterday’s discussion. For if some God had advised a man who was pursued by pirates to throw himself overboard, saying, “There is something at hand to receive you — either a dolphin will take you up, as it did Arion of Methymna, or those horses sent by Neptune to Pelops, who were said to have carried chariots so rapidly as to be borne up by the waves, will receive you and convey you wherever you please — cast away all fear.” So though your pains be ever so sharp and disagreeable, if the case is not such that it is worth your while to endure them, you see whither you may betake yourself. I think this will do for the present. But perhaps you still abide by your opinion?
Kalosyni: Not the least, indeed, and I hope I am freed by these two days’ discourses from the fear of the two things that I greatly dreaded.
Joshua: Tomorrow then for rhetoric, as we were saying. But I see we must not drop our philosophy.
Kalosyni: No indeed, we will have the one in the forenoon and this at the usual time.
Joshua: It shall be so, and I will comply with your very laudable inclinations.
Cassius: Okay, thank you Joshua and Kalosyni. That brings us to the end of section two. Before we start the general summary, let’s talk about what was in this last section. Kind of interesting to me, the ending — I wonder if this is intended to convey that Cicero acknowledges the questionable nature of some of his argument, because the student is saying that I hope I am freed by these two days’ discourses from the fear of the two things I greatly dreaded, which is fear of death and fear of pain. And then in response Cicero says, well, tomorrow we’ll take up rhetoric, but I see we must not drop our philosophy, and they talk about doing one in the morning and one in the afternoon. So I see here a little bit of an indication that Cicero is acknowledging that it is certainly possible to debate this issue and that it’s not as clear as it might seem.
Because what he’s doing here in this final paragraph is returning to his general argument that whether we consider pain to be evil or not, if it’s evil then it can be overcome by virtue; if it’s not evil then it’s still something that we have to deal with, and we deal with it by applying the same standard to all the different difficulties and pains of life. We don’t just focus our preparation and our study on a particular type of pain — we make sure we understand that it applies to everything. He uses the examples of the Greeks, whom he slams here by saying that they are not very courageous in the military, but they’re as smart a people as anybody anywhere can be — that the Greeks can’t face their enemies face-to-face, but they can overcome sickness with a manly spirit — contrasting them with the Cimbrians and Celtiberians who are able to be very alert in battle but cannot handle sickness very well. Cicero’s saying that we need to apply the same standard of overcoming pain across the board.
But the problem with Cicero’s analysis is where he goes next: whether you call this evil or disagreeable or contrary to nature or not, it can effectively be got the better of by virtue as to disappear. Think of this night and day, he says, this argument will consume all of your thoughts and it’s not confined to pain alone. The motives of all our actions are to avoid disgrace and acquire honor — always buttressed, in Cicero’s point of view, by thinking about the fact that God himself can protect the person who is pursued by pirates, in a nod to the biblical story of Jonah, that either a dolphin or a divine chariot will receive you and convey you where you please, though your pains be ever so sharp and disagreeable. And then Cicero concludes, “I think this will do for the present” — summarizing it again as an appeal to virtue, honor, and nature herself telling us what is virtuous and honorable. Which is of course a very, very problematic position to take.
Joshua: Cicero says, on the subject of bearing wounds in battle versus bearing a disease, that the stakes are different, so sometimes the outcomes are different. He says, “Therefore some barbarians and savage people are able to fight very stoutly with the sword but cannot bear sickness like men; but the Grecians — men of no great courage, but as wise as human nature will admit of — cannot look an enemy in the face, yet the same will bear to be visited with sickness tolerably and with a sufficiently manly spirit.” It’s interesting here that he cites the Greeks as men of no great courage, because he’s always referencing people like Socrates and Epaminondas and these other great Greek heroes of the past. Of course, we have to understand that in Cicero’s time, Greece was under Roman occupation and was a source of many, many domestic slaves in the Roman Empire, and so if your exposure to a group of people is what they’re like in that condition, it might give you a very different perspective.
But these are the same people who gave us the story of Leonidas at Thermopylae, which Cicero would certainly say was exemplary courage on the part of the Greeks. So we maybe have some interesting sociological or historical interpretations leaking into the story here. But I did want to draw that out because it does appear to be contradictory that Cicero is always going on about the Greeks and what they thought and what they did and how they behaved in war and so on — and then he says here they’re men of no great courage. It’s an interesting little aside there in the text.
Cassius: Yeah Joshua, well, pointing out inconsistencies in Cicero’s argument has been a theme of this entire section as it is the entire book. But now that we’re at the end of section two, why don’t we spend a few minutes and conclude today’s episode by just sort of summarizing what we’re getting out of this part of the argument. Again, we started with the argument about fear of death, and Cicero ultimately wanting to argue that we could look forward to a better life after death, reverting back to the Platonic idea that the soul preexisted human life and the soul is going to go to a better place — at least if you do the right things, if you’re virtuous and honorable in life — and he grounds his argument ultimately on a worldview that again is totally inconsistent with Epicurean philosophy because it presupposes a heaven or a divine creator or a realm of existence after death.
Here in section two in regard to pain, he’s also taken a series of steps that contradict fundamental premises about the nature of life from the Epicurean point of view. But it’s good for us at this point to sort of summarize what we take away from this before we move on to the next section, which is going to be on bearing grief or mental pain. Again, this section in part two has largely been devoted to bodily pain and examples of diseases and wounds and war and so forth, and how to deal with those. Starting next week, we’ll go into pains that cause a mental or emotional problem. But now let’s summarize our assessment of Cicero’s argument as to bodily pain.
Joshua: Well, it is always interesting here and elsewhere in Cicero’s text to see the criticism that he holds out for the Stoics, and I think that makes an interesting starting point in looking at his view of pain. Because in paragraph 18 of section two of this text, Cicero says this regarding the Stoics: “Let the Stoics then think it their business to determine whether pain be an evil or not. While they endeavor to show by some strained and trifling conclusions, which are nothing to the purpose, that pain is no evil, my opinion is that whatever it is, it is not so great as it appears, and I say that men are influenced to a great extent by some false representations and appearance of it, and that all which is really felt is capable of being endured.” That makes an interesting thesis statement. He’s saying that the Stoics are arguing over whether it’s an evil or not. He’s going on in the next paragraph to say, “This Epicurus offers himself to you, a man far from a bad — or I should rather say a very good — man. He advises no more than he knows: despise pain, says he.” So he’s citing this argument among the Stoics, between the Stoics and the Epicureans and these other philosophical groups.
And it’s interesting that he takes as his thesis statement in this entire section: “My opinion is that whatever pain turns out to be — whatever that is that we’re talking about — it is not so great as it appears, and I say that men are influenced to a great extent by some false representations and appearance of it, and that all which is really felt is capable of being endured.” The Stoics are saying that pain is not only not an evil but is something to be indifferent to. The Epicureans are saying that pain is a great evil. And Cicero is saying that while pain is certainly not nothing, it is unpleasant, and we can see in story after story how different people respond to it — but where he draws the line here is that pain is endurable and that we make it worse by focusing on certain appearances of it and false representations and so on.
This mirrors in some ways Epicurus’s own arguments on death — that when you fear death you are piling extra grief onto the process of dying, and that what you really need to be doing is understand that death is nothing to you, that it’s not some horrible thing to be afraid of, because if you do that it’s not only going to poison the moment of death, it’s also going to poison your life with fear and with this false perspective. And Cicero is doing the same thing with pain. He is saying that we make pain worse by dwelling on it with the imagination essentially, that we use our minds to enlarge pain when we should be using our minds and our reason to diminish pain, to push it down and to bear it — manfully as he would say, gracefully as I would say. So I think that sets up an interesting conversation there, and then he goes on to speak of how this actually plays out in a whole number of different situations. But that thesis statement there in section 18 I think represents a good starting point for how to summarize his thoughts.
Cassius: I agree, Joshua, and that’s going to remind me to say something I intended to add last week but didn’t get an opportunity to. It is very interesting how much of the conclusion and many of the techniques — for example, of preparing for pain and so forth — that Cicero is talking about, I think are ultimately consistent with the position that Epicurus would agree with. When Cicero says that ultimately pain is not as bad as we fear it to be, I say that’s right in there with Epicurus’s conclusions that pain is generally going to be manageable if it’s long or short, if it’s acute, and that there’s always ultimately a way to escape from it, so that we need not let ourselves be panicked into believing that pain is going to hold us in its grip forever and let it color all of the decisions in our lives — to believe that pain and the avoidance of pain is the reason for existence and the core of our existence and the focus of our goals.
The difficulty always comes back to this question of why and what is your rationale behind your decision making, because Cicero wants you to look to eternal gods, ultimate forms in another ideal dimension, things that do not exist. And he does that, I would say, because the Stoics — people of Cicero’s disposition — wish to project their own personal values onto nature and then use that as the argument why all people should conform to their viewpoint, because nature herself agrees with the Stoa, as Nietzsche might say. And that is as ridiculous an argument as could possibly occur to someone who really has an understanding of the way things really are, as the Epicureans do — which is that nature is not supernatural. It has no intelligent decision-making behind it that’s going to tell us what is honorable and what is dishonorable, or what is base or what is malicious. Those things have to be decided by us using reason, using the information from our senses and the faculty of pain and pleasure that nature gave to us.
So I don’t think it could possibly be a more divergent way of analysis, and that really is the key thing that we need to keep in mind, I think, as we’re studying Cicero. There is a deception and manipulation of the facts behind Cicero’s argument that we need to see through, so that we realize that in fact nature does not designate that Marcus Regulus and John Brown or any particular people are virtuous in themselves or to be considered by all people at all times to be heroic. These questions are contextual and must be evaluated according to the circumstances, as Epicurus points out to us.
The point that I started to raise last week and will raise now is that Cicero not only was wrong in his analysis, but he guaranteed the destruction rather than the preservation of the Roman-Greek way of life in the ancient world, because this ridiculous appeal to the Greek and Roman gods and ideal forms and so forth was about to be swept away by the influx of monotheistic religion from the east, which the Roman way of looking at gods and ideal forms was entirely ill-equipped to deal with. If Cicero had opened his mind to Epicurean philosophy — as he appeared to be slightly opening it in appreciating the actions of Cassius Longinus near the end of his life — I would maintain that all of the better things of Greco-Roman civilization, in terms of the appreciation for the philosophy that we’re talking about, in terms of the appreciation for science, in terms of the aqueducts and all of the building and so forth, all the good things that Roman society embodied, this appreciation of an uplifting view of humanity and mankind embodied in the Greek artwork and the Greek statues and so forth — those things are not inconsistent with Epicurean philosophy and a proper appreciation of the way things really are.
In other words, if Cicero had stopped looking down his nose at Democritus and the atomic theory and opened his mind to the idea that it’s not necessary to give in to supernatural gods in order to be a moral people — the example that Diogenes of Oenoanda gives in his inscription, that it is in fact the most religious people who are the most despicable, and that when you free your mind through Epicurean philosophy you see the true basis of morality — as Torquatus demonstrates, Epicurus provides a much stronger foundation for virtue than any Stoic ever came up with, because Epicurus’s view of nature is true and their view of nature is false.
It’s a tragedy from my point of view, because I do have much admiration for Cicero’s intellectual power, and if he had been willing to spend a little more time listening to Atticus — listening to Titus — listening to his other Epicurean friends, I think he would have recognized that Epicurean philosophy provided a way forward that Stoicism and Academic Skepticism was bound to betray. Because if you know nothing, then that’s a ridiculous position. That skepticism that he ultimately rooted much of his position in is a total dead end, as is this Platonic supernatural analysis of the way things really are, which is itself a dead end.
Cicero had Quintus Cicero read Lucretius. Cicero may have even participated in editing Lucretius. He had studied in Athens from the Epicureans. He could and apparently was relatively friendly with them until right near the end, when Cicero got overcome by the death of his daughter, his exile from Roman politics. It’s Cicero who in his own personal life failed to apply what he’s talking about here in Tusculan Disputations, and I would say he failed to apply it because it cannot be applied given the false foundation on which it is built. Epicurean philosophy would have been much better for Cicero to adopt and would have led him in many of the same ways that he really did want to go along with Cassius Longinus. But it was not to be, and this is an example of things I think we can learn from the study of Roman-Greek history and from works such as the Tusculan Disputations. Okay, well, with that discussion of what might have been but which was not to be, we’ll bring our discussion of part two of the Tusculan Disputations to an end. As always, we invite you to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other discussions about Epicurean philosophy. Thanks for your time today. We’ll see you next week. Bye.