Cicero: serious thinker or self-promoting politico? It is not my custom to read extremely old texts cynically (though the reverse is true of recent texts), so I would prefer to take him at his word, but a case could be made--and has been, by the professor who taught the course last semester--that he is mostly a disingenuous hack. Isn't it just so convenient that, after so much condemnation of faction and political violence, he manages to endorse the assassinations of the Gracchii and then of Caesar? And property, though not natural, is a thing to be defended at all costs once obtained and utterly unamenable to redistribution. Oratory is more honorable than generalship when Cicero happened to excel at the former but not the latter. And so on.
It would be easier to assume these difficulties pointed to serious arguments about, say, the nature of property rather than self-serving sophistry if Cicero were an otherwise trustworthy historian of his times. But the way he recounts his own consulship suggests that either he really believes, or he merely would like you to believe, that he was Rome's personal savior. For example, from
On Duties:
When I held the helm of the republic, did not arms then yield to the toga? Never was there more serious danger to the republic than then, and never was there greater quiet. Through my vigilance and my counsel the very arms swiftly slipped and fell from the hands of the most audacious citizens. Was any achievement of war ever so great? What military triumph can stand comparison?
Whatever doubts Cicero's rather immoderate self-regard may cast on his seriousness, my sense is that it appears primarily in those of his works addressed to his brother, son, or Atticus and Brutus, who appear to be his closest friends. Granted, this is most of his work. But at least he is self-aware--the line following the excerpt above excuses his shamelessness: "I am allowed to boast to you, Marcus my son." Fair enough.
It is easy enough for me to put aside the pomposity and the fortuitous coincidence of Cicero's principles and his political commitments. Looking cynically at ancient political thought is much harder than taking it seriously because cynicism requires a kind of intimate knowledge of the political world and the alternatives to an author's claims that I don't really have about first century Rome. But I don't want to be suckered into undeserved sympathy for Cicero either. So, I'm going back and forth on this.
