Cicero

Abstract

Epicurus confronted Cicero with a singular situation: a philosopher whom he thought had managed, despite professing erroneous doctrines, to live a philosophical life and thus overcome the incoherence of his doctrines. Schooled in Epicureanism in his youth and surrounded by Epicurean friends, Cicero nonetheless retained a strong aversion to Epicurean doctrines. Too many of the basic assumptions of Epicurus’s philosophy ran at cross-purposes with the deepest currents of his personality. Accepting Epicureanism would have required him to admit that society and ethics were grounded in the unstable vagaries of individuals’ desires for pleasure. So too, the Epicurean tendency to build everything upon self-interest appeared to deprive traditional Roman axiology of any true foundation. What is more, for him who had placed such importance on the concept of free will as a self-generated cause, the connection fashioned by Epicureans between voluntary action and the swerve of atoms governed by chance failed to provide a plausible rational explanation and, he thought, would inevitably act to dilute individual responsibility. Epicureanism, which counted immediate sense perceptions as necessarily true; rejected a philosophical language inaccessible to the masses; made its gods distant and indifferent yet all-too-visible; built an ethics so easy to grasp—and caricature; claimed to illuminate everything with a shining light; advertised its distrust for social and political hierarchies—all this was ultimately too distant, both intellectually and emotionally, from the conception of the world that was Cicero’s own.