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William H. F. Altman, "The Revival of Platonism in Cicero's Late Philosophy: Platonis Aemulus and the Invention of Cicero" (Lexington Books, 2016)
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- [00:02]
William Altman
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William Altman
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Joseph Liss
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William Altman
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William Altman
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Joseph Liss
Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Joseph Liss. I'm your host for today. I have the great pleasure to be joined once again by William Altman. I'm talking today with him about his 2016 book the Revival of Platonism in Cicero's Late Platonus Emulus and the Invention of Cicero published by Lexington Books in 2016. William, welcome once again.
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William Altman
Thank you very much, Joseph.
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Joseph Liss
Yeah, great to be with you. So yeah, let's discuss this book. It was from a few years ago now, but has a lot of relevance for, for us with where we find ourselves in America today. So yeah, let's start out just by telling us a bit about yourself and, and Cicero. How did you come to find Cicero important to your life and how did you come to write a book about him?
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William Altman
Well, I don't ever recall reading Cicero in, in college or graduate school. My relationship with Cicero really began, I guess it really began under, in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. There was a, a document published by the Reagan administration. I think Bill Bennett was the head of the, the, what's it called? National Endowment for the Humanities. And A Nation At Risk was the name of this. And it was basically that the nation was at risk, and I thought the nation was at risk too, but largely because we had just elected a movie actor divorced fellow that was claiming to be the epitome of virtue. And I kind of was pretty fond of, of Jimmy Carter, who I worked for in 1980. And when I realized that my Straussian friends at the University of Toronto were all pushing for Reagan's election, I didn't really have much of a beat on the Straussians at that time, but I didn't like that very much. And so when I started teaching public school, which I started in 1981, my second year as a public school teacher, I decided to do something about it and to write a, a citizenship curriculum that was to my mind geared to the, what I felt was the incipient crisis or growing crisis of our own republic. And it was a course called Three Democracies, of which the motto was there is nothing more important for the future citizens of a democracy to know than the causes that have led to the collapse of the great democratic governments of the past. So it was an interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary 9th grade citizenship course written at a 9th grade reading level, but it was all primary source based. And I, I already had a clear vision of the Athenian section of the course that was the first of the three democracies, basically what is covered by Thucydides, but with great supports from Plutarch and the Tragedians and Plato and, you know, all the rest. The, the German section was not heavily literary. I had a great book of pictures by Stephen Laurent called Zig Heil, which I wrote recommend to your auditors, marvelous picture book and history book that I was going to base the German section on. But I knew that the, the middle section was going to be about the fall of the Roman Republic. And that required me to take a crash course or give myself a crash course in Marcus Tullius Cicero because he was the center of the course, both in a literary sense and in a philosophical sense. So I would say that, that what I, I, I read Cicero thoroughly in the early 80s and, and that that became the basis of, of my interest in him. And you know, in, in reflecting on talking to you today, one thing that occurred to me is that, well, so for example, one of the things I was going to say was that Cicero was born in 106 BC and died in 43 BC and that that's Easy to remember because they, excuse me, there's 63 years before 106 and 43. And that 63 is the year that Cicero was consol at the age of 43. And I know all of that stuff because I've taught this a thousand times. I apologize to any of your auditors today if my comments seem, oh, I don't know, as if they were geared to a ninth grade audience. But that would just be because I've taught cicero to a 9th grade audience for I taught for many years. And so, so the answer to your question is because of three democracies. Although even then it was against the backdrop of what I felt was already an embryo in so so example. Just for example, when Ronald Reagan appointed a guy named Ken Edelman to the nuclear weapon. To the nuclear. I forget what the name of the administration was and that all Kenneth Abton was no Ableman was known for is that he'd written an eloquent against nuclear control. In other words, appointed, you know, the idea of, when he appointed James Watt to be the head of the Interior Department where James Watt was a big rancher that was completely against any kind of regulation on public lands in the west, that, that kind of, you know, slightly tongue in cheek, you know, own the libs, put the fox and you know, Pam Bondi's not far, not far from, from, from, from the, from the future when James Watt is the Secretary of the Interior. And I, I was not amused by those things. I thought that that was a kind of dangerous precedent and wrote the three democracies course as an, as an, as an antidote to, to what I, to what I saw coming and tried basically to inoculate my students against a slick talking fellow. My, my version was a Texas businessman that I now in retrospect see as a kind of parallel between a kind of amalgam of W and, and, and djt who was going to go to Washington and knock some heads together and get, you know, get rid of the gridlock and get things moving again. And you know, various code words that I could show had their roots in what had happened in Athens and Rome and in Weimar. So that was when I developed my love affair for Cicero. And then it just, you know, it continued.
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Joseph Liss
Yeah. So I mean, in your answer it certainly comes out that something essential to democracy and to the, to the forces that challenge democracy is a sense that there has to be some kind of a state check upon, you know, private acquisitiveness. And it's very easy for forces to arrive proclaiming themselves to be reformers, but who are actually just going to kind of you assert sort of the unmitigated primacy of individual property holding and will assail kind of all functions of the state as limitations on that. And yeah, I mean, I think as we talk more we'll certainly see parallels to this phenomenon in the life of Cicero.
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William Altman
So.
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Joseph Liss
Yes, is there anything you'd like to tell us about just kind of what are the conditions Cicero, the Roman conditions that Cicero arrives into just to sort of set the stage for the drama of his life?
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William Altman
Well, I mean, I guess the first thing to say is that the Roman Republic was already considerably older than ours at the time that it entered into crisis somewhat before Cicero's activity. I mean he, he was alive when Sulla and Marius, when, when things kind of, kind of burst into to kind of open civil war. And it was clear that the republic was very sick, but it had already survived a lot longer than ours has by the time he came on the scene. And I guess the thing to say is that, you know, Plebians, Cicero was not a nobleman and he was a new man, as they said it came from a family that had never held high office and he was a very bright guy from what I guess we would call an upper middle class background, extremely well educated and smart in comparison to his fellows and that would end up climbing the slippery ladder to the highest offices in the Roman republic in an impressive fashion given his new man status. He was from the same town as Marius Arpinum. It's not, it's not, it would, you know, it had been a Roman ally for some time, but it was not, you know, he was not a blue blood and, and was looked down upon even by his allies who were blue blooded. In other words, no, excuse me, I put that wrong. Was looked down by his fellow republican allies because he was not blue blooded. And so you know, that, I guess that's the background. Although I guess the most important part of the background is the thing that I just touched over briefly, which is that, you know, Roman, when I wrote Three Democracies and remember I didn't really write it, I just gathered up primary sources. I mean very early I introduced the Gracchi and that's, that's a very, that, that I didn't realize at the time that beginning the story of the fall of the Roman republic with the Gracchi kind of plays into Caesar's hand because Caesar, who's going to overthrow the republic, claims to be, you know, a reformer, as I think your remarks suggested. And that you know, he's defending the tribun because the Gracchi were tribunes which was the office established for the, for the, for the protection of the people from the blue bloods. Cicero never held that office. He climbed the blue blood ladder. But that, that you know in, in retrospect the, the, the Sulla who was mentioned in the 80s when Cicero was in his 20s, Cicero's first law case and after all Cicero was a lawyer. Law case was brought him directly against Sulla who was kind of an, an aristocratic Cornelius Sulla old family, blue blood to the max. The republic was already sick but it wasn't dead. That, that I think is extremely important that, that I don't know if, if your questions later will touch on this but I want to say it right off hand which is that. Well no, no, maybe we'll wait till it comes up more naturally. I was just going to talk about debates about the fall of the Roman Republic because you can't really talk about Cicero without, without considering, without considering him in the context of quote the fall of the Roman Republic, close quote. And so for example, if you don't think that there, the Roman Republic, if you feel like it was just a natural evolution between a corrupt aristocratic pseudo democratic regime of imperial land grabbing to a more rational system under first Caesar and then Augustus and that it was just a natural transition and the name of scholars that take that line is legion in the United States thanks to the great and influential Eric Gruen out in Berkeley. Then Cicero is reduced to the level of a minor character and a very. And a kind of what I not fossilized but just largely unimportant except when we need all the data in his letters, speeches, orations and philosophical works to be able to say one damn thing about the fall of the Roman Republic or rather its non fall as the case may be. So I guess the kind of third thing would be against the backdrop of a chaotic interesting time that might be called the crisis of the Roman Republic.
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Joseph Liss
Right. So yeah, you mentioned the blue blood ladder that Cicero climbed. So yeah, could you tell us a little bit about that? Like this kind of remarkable sequence of public offices that Cicero achieves at a quite young age, especially for a so called new man who's not from, who does not hail from Rome. Its he rises very quickly to these elected offices called the Quaestor and Aedile and Praetor and Consul. So tell us a little bit about kind of the sequence of his career rising.
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William Altman
Well so it was called the Curza Sonorum and It wasn't just his career. It was by tradition the minimum age to hold the consulate was 43. And so it was a great honor to be elected to the consulship, but it was a greater honor to be elected to the consulship in the first year of your eligibility for that. Kind of like getting into the Baseball hall of Fame on the first ballot. And Cicero did that at 43. And then since I've taught this so many times, if you, if you subtract 12 from 43 you get 31. That was the date that you could hold the first office, which was basically a treasury official of quaestor. And Cicero did that. So Cicero is a Quaestor at 31 in the year 75 BC because he was born in 106. And then the ideal ship, which was basically, oh, it was a little bit like the mayor of Rome, especially the head ideal because you bred in circuses. The later imperial slogan, a rough way of thinking about the ideal that was six years later. So you split 12 and a half at six. He was the ideal in 37. And then you split the last six in half. Praetor, which was basically a judge, I don't know whether you'd call him the equivalent would be an appellate judge or a state. I, I guess it would be a federal judge presiding over a federal court of various types. Not broken down so much by appeal, but broken down by subject. So he was praetor in, in, in, in, in 66, because of course we're counting backwards at the age of 40 and then was consul in 43. So the easy way to remember that is, As I said, 106 to 43 is 63. 63, he was 43. Subtract 12 from 43, you get 31 and then split that in half. You get the ideal ship and split the remaining in half and you get the praetor ship. So that's just an old history teacher using tricks because I made them learn day my kids would come out of this ninth grade class. I, I, that's maybe a hard to believe, but they would certainly know all of those dates and many, many more. So go ahead.
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Joseph Liss
So, yeah, tell us a little bit about, you know, the, the forces that are aligning to, to overthrow the institutions of the Roman republic and how, what, what's Cicero's strategy to defend it? How does he position himself and, and, and, and you know, I guess also maybe touch upon like why, why is he doing Roman republican ideals and institutions? Is he, is he trying to align himself with and defend.
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William Altman
Well, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's tricky that, that, that. I think it's often said that Cicero idealized the Roman Republic. And you know, a lot of my work and, and my instinct from the beginning because, you know, I was already a Platonist, I, I went in. Maybe I could use my own case as a parallel. I mean, I, I became a public high school teacher not because I thought that the American public school system was an ideal thing that deserved like whatever you just asked in your question, like what was it about the American public school system that made you, William Altman, decide that you really wanted to devote your life to it? That isn't really the right question. It's kind of what is it that Plato teaches us that makes it necessary for a guy to become an American public school teacher at the time of a nation in crisis or to go into politics at the time of Sulla and Marius? I personally think that he was pretty aware of how messed up things were. He understood full well all of the obstacles that stood in his way. And I think that he went down into the cave. This is what my whole, you know, approach to Cicero is about, is that he did it as a Platonist, not because, not because so much its merits. It just is that he, that, that I think he felt that, you know, there was still freedom. He could only, he could look at his own career and see that it was possible to advance even if the cards were somewhat stacked against you. And he could see that they were highly ambitious guys. He knew Julius Caesar very well and could see what kind of an ambitious fellow he was and could, you know, prognosticate without much difficulty on the basis of a guy that he admired Marius and a guy that he didn't admire Sulla, that, that, you know, the, the writing was on the wall in terms of big, strong military, strong men rising up to power. And I think that Cicero felt that the best thing that he could do was find a big strong military guy rising to power who at least could be, could be persuaded or cajoled into thinking that the Roman Republic in its traditional form was worth, was, was worth preserving or rather was not just a slightly moribund cancer ridden victim that deserved to be pushed over a cliff. And, and, and he found that in Pompey, one of Sulla's henchmen, who like him was a fellow knight, in other words, not of noble birth but of upper middle class financial ability, and who was a, you know, known as Pomp for his achievements out in the east, he's the guy that brought Jerusalem into the Roman Empire just for. For example, and did that in 63 BC, the year Cicero was consul. And that, you know, what. What ended up happening is that defending the Roman republic largely meant backing Pompy against Caesar. And so the best you can say about that is that it was the lesser of two evils. And of course, this was a major point I tried to get across in democracies class that if you're waiting for Superman, if you're waiting for a perfect guy to come along, well, you're going to have a long wait. That the whole idea of a republic, which is an awkward balance between monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. And I kind of introduced the Roman section with the famous passage in Polybius where from a Greek perspective, he analyzed the Roman Republic in terms of the three pure forms of government known to the Greeks, is that, you know, I. Shades of gray and the lesser of two evils was what I was trying to get across to my students. So, and, and. And you can see that very plainly in Cicero. I mean, Cicero understood the flaws both in the regime he was defending and in the. And the champion that in many respects he elevated, defended, and eloquently supported Pompey, that is Pompey the Great, without any wholehearted love. Love for them. What. What? Say that. That. That maybe is too. Too weak. I think he loved the Rome. I think he loved the traditions of the Roman republic and knew that it had functioned in an amazing way and that what it had done in the world was extraordinary and that the virtue of its early, you know, progenitors was eminently imitatable and wonderful. But he knew that it was sick. And he knew that the times he was living in were desperate. And that despite the fact that he knew that there is a. There's a. There's a tendency to idolize the Roman Republic in his writings, which, depending on one's temper as a reader, one can either say he was a naive moron for doing that, or can say that this was just a way to garner support for an institution that he was trying to defend to the best of his ability. And it seems pretty clear to me it was the latter.
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Joseph Liss
Right. The primary form this threat takes is. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit more about Sulla. So he is this figure. He kind of. In a way, he sort of sets the template for future attempts, both unsuccessful and successful, to effectively overthrow the republic. And so in broad strokes, the case of Sulla is basically the case of a victorious general returning to Rome with his armies and suddenly finding himself in a position where like, oh, hey, I can take everything I could just kind of knock over this whole system and kind of, you know, quote unquote, reform the republican in accordance with my will simply because of the position he found himself in as kind of the general in command of the army, returning in victory. So, you know, in a sense, like what the Roman people would want. But there's this, you know, there's this big problem attached to it.
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William Altman
So.
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Joseph Liss
Yeah, I mean, do you have anything more, you might say about Sula and how he kind of. And how the example of Sula sort of became. I don't know, it seems like the example of Sulla became, Became this sort of this looming temptation that's like, oh, wow, Sula got away with a lot. And, and you know, seems like anyone, if anyone could maybe kind of push that farther, they'd. They'd really be. Really be in pole position.
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William Altman
Yeah, well, I think you put it very well. I don't have that much to add, but I will say that, you know, as a, As a guy that was born in 1955 and kind of grew up with, you know, James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy, is that one of the, One of the principles of my Three Democracies course that I called the Prime Directive because there's a Prime Directive in the original Star Trek to not interfere with societies. It was very. Actually similar. Is that the teacher of the Three Democracies course and I trained several other people to teach it was never to mention the United States, never to mention any parallels to the United States until the students did. That was the Prime Directive. They, the, the course was really about the United States. Everybody, everybody teaching it understood that, but that, that it had to emerge from the students. And the first year that I taught the course, I had a, A, I had a blind student that I needed to tape record the lessons for him. And both because he was a bright kid and also because I think it helped to listen to the readings to get more of the spirit of the. To. To. To. To. To make a long story short, Mark Baxter was the kid's name, was the first one to make a parallel. And the parallel he made was when we got to the part it's actually in the career of Marius the who Salah kind of edged out where Marius began, began reforming the Roman army along the lines of not having citizen soldiers who had a military obligation to serve, but who served because they volunteered. In other words, the transition to what we would call in the United States an all volunteer military force takes place and that, and that when Sulla tells his men to march on Rome, they're more inclined to do that than they would have been if they had been small householders that had beaten Hannibal, for example at Trasamine and Cannae, or rather got wiped out at Trasamine and really got wiped out of Canada anyway had beaten Hannibal like those guys as Zema I guess is the battle to mention anyway. And you know, Mark, Mark Baxter just said, you know, isn't. I remember the class. He said isn't that, isn't that kind of like what's happening in the United States? Isn't that what's going on with us? And, and from then on I gave, I gave the student, I, I gave out what I called the Mark Baxter prize which was the first given to the first kid to see the purpose of the class which, that it's really not about three democracies. After all the Roman Republic and the Weimar Republic were republics. They weren't even democracies. So it's not. The name is all messed up. And, and, and if the democracy is messed up because it's really about the fourth democracy or the third Republic, depending on how you look at it. In other words, the United States of America. So I have nothing to add to what you said about Sulla. I thought that was well put. I, I brought in the thing about the rivalry with Marius. Marius was that Su. Sulla had to supplant him. But I think you, you, you can put it well. I mean there, there were always very ambitious Romans though. I mean that the invent ambition, it had been done before but, but then again there were many republican examples. Cincinnatus being the famous one who, you know, at a time of crisis is appointed dictator, which of course was a temporary position but given absolute power and that he resigned his dictatorship when the job was done and went back to his, you know, 10 acre farm. And let's just say that those days were, that those days were gone and that Sulla did represent. Excuse me, did represent a kind of change in the direction that you just indicated.
- [28:18]
Joseph Liss
Yeah.
- [28:18]
William Altman
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Joseph Liss
So yeah, before we move on to Cicero's texts and specifically his philosophical works, is there anything you'd like to say about kind of Cicero as a character? So, you know, I read Plutarch's entry on the life of Cicero and Plutarch's kind of verdict is that, you know, Cicero was, I mean, obviously a brilliant and kind of supremely talented and driven individual, but he was overly demonstrative to a fault. And Plutarch describes his quote, uncontrollable appetite for distinction and associates that with Cicero's eventual downfall. But. Yeah, how do you see Cicero as a character, As a personality?
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William Altman
Yeah, well, I, you know, I used to say to my students, you know, Cicero wasn't perfect and, and, and, and, and in my effort to persuade you to be, you know, the defender of the fourth democracy, I don't expect you to be any better than he is. You know, he had an ego and was flawed in a number of ways. Actually. I think what Plutarch mostly takes him to task for is an acerbic sense of humor that was always like insulting people and got himself into trouble because he couldn't resist making a clever balmo. And you know, the idea that Cicero caused Cicero's downfall, I just find that farcical that Cicero had plenty of enemies and after he dealt with an insurrection during his consulship in 63, the so called conspiracy of Catiline, his enemies were powerful and they eventually beat him. But it wasn't just because he made wives cracks or you know, boasted about destroying the conspiracy of Cataline or was, as you say, overly demonstrative like that. That's, those, those, those may well have all have been flaws but, and they may have been true, but that's not what caused his downfall. You know, that, that, that, that the Gruin school, it's, they, they don't even go into the downfall of Cicero. They just say Cicero is a m, is, is. Unfortunately, we're totally dependent on Cicero for our information about this very interesting period. But Cicero totally overestimated his own importance, was a minor player that kind of glorified his position and saw it as much more important than it, than it is. And so they don't even want to go into something like the downfall of Cicero because that would imply that he was like a tragic hero that had once been high. So you can tell a lot about A guy, by the way they feel about Cicero is kind of the way I put it, and I would make an exception to that statement when discussing Plutarch is that I personally think that Plutarch loved Cicero every bit as much as I did. But loving Cicero wasn't that cool a thing to do under the Roman Empire. And after all, he had basically been put to death under the auspices of the otherwise benign, good emperor Octavian Augustus. And so, you know, to really say that Cicero was a great guy and was flawless, that wasn't a really great thing to say. And I think Plutarch, Plutarch understands how great Cicero is. A very clear indication of that is that he pairs him with Demosthenes, who was Cicero's hero, as the great Greek orator. But the greatest compliment that Plutarch paid to Cicero was when he paired Brutus the Roman with Dion of Sicily Syracuse, because Dion was a student at Plato's and Brutus was the recipient of the dedication of several of Cicero's most important philosophical and rhetorical works. And by pairing him with Plato and of course, Plutarch, like the same as I do, believed that Demosthenes too had been a student of Plato's. Is that you start getting into a kind of, you kind of get into a philosophical Cicero. That, that, that certainly doesn't figure much in the historiographical treatment of him. You see, one of the problems with Cicero, with Cicero studies, is that if you were really going to be a great Cicero scholar, you would have to have a PhD in classics, so that your Latin was excellent and your Greek was better. You'd have to be, you'd have to have a PhD in history to understand all the ins and outs of the first and second Triumvirate. You'd have to, you'd have to be, you'd have to have studied rhetoric with great care. And, and, and, and by no means the least important of the four is you'd have to have a PhD in philosoph. To understand Cicero's position in the history of philosophy requires you to be very learned. And that, you know, since it's pretty hard to get four PhDs in those four subjects, the best you can kind of hope to do is to be a kind of interested dilettante who's got one foot in all of those areas. And, you know, that thinks that Cicero can be taught to ninth graders. And I feel very fortunate that I was that kind of dilettante that had enough, at least enough of those. My course is philosophy, but I always was very interested in history and classics and to make an arch comment is that the rise of the PhD was very detrimental to Cicero. In other words, the specialization that was involved. And when you start looking at the way Cicero is treated by philosophers on the one hand, historians on the other hand, treatises on rhetoric on the other hand hand, you know that, that, that he gets lost. He just gets lost somewhere in there because of course he's all of those things. He's all of those things amalgamated and that you really need to have all of those lenses to, to, to get a, to get a picture of him. I yeah, yeah, there's a, there's a Cicero's name. I I guess if we wanted to pronounce it Chichero. It means chickpea in, in. In in Latin. And and of course the idea is that, that he had a little, not a dimple in the chin, that kind of cleft in the chin that so many people have, but a little dimple in his nose with a slightly bulbous nose with a little dimple in it and that, that's, that it kind of looked like a chickpea at the end of one of his ancestors nose and that's how he got it. And Plutarch tells this story about how somebody the. How Cicero had a piece of silver like a plate made with a, with a chickpea on it when he was a. Maybe in. When he was the Quor. And then somebody said why the hell are you celebrating that? Like that's not a very elegant name. Like why are you drawing attention to what is after all an embarrassing name? And Cicero said, said I'm going to cause my name to be more famous than that of all my noble opponents at the exact same time that he went to, he went to Sicily as quaestor and brought a charge against a pretty prominent guy named Various. His name meant pig like meant bristling boar. And some of people in Sicily that, that had, that had. That. That developed a hatred for Various were the Jewish merchants of, of Syracuse. And so Cicero joked when they wanted to go after Various. And I thought you Jews didn't you know, didn't touch pork. That was that. That's typical of his witticisms. So he wins. He, he, he defeats Varies come Varies has stolen all these statues and embezzlement and peculation, bribery. Anyway, it comes back to Rome home runs into a friend and says hey, what are people saying about me? Like what. What are people saying about my quaestorship in, in Sicily? And his friend says to him have you been away, I didn't even know you'd gone. And that as Plutarch comments, it was then that Cicero realized that, you know, all of his ambition and, you know, his desire to do good was just like a drop in the bucket of the great mass of Rome. And I think somewhere in those three stories that I, you know, wove together, you can, you can see, you can, you could, you could turn those into a basis for criticism, but you could also take a more sympathetic view. I, I, what I was tasked, I, I, I've, I would say I've written two books about Cicero. You, you were kind enough to mention my book, the one that, that you mentioned on the, the Platon, but I also edited the Brill's Companion to the Reception of Cicero. And I should add that I'm not a big fan of reception studies. I find that a pretty bogus thing. And, and, and, and, and I, I try, you know, I tried to subvert the genre a little bit in my book because what, what, what reception studies turns into is there are many Ciceros, you know, like there's this Cicero and that Cicero and blah, blah, blah. And you know, I was just making the obvious point that there's a Cicero, you know, and what's really going on is the different ages. I guess the, the point of my book was that you can kind of judge an age by the way it responds to Marcus Tullius Cicero and that when they trash him, that that's not a healthy time for a republic, and when they love him, then the French Revolution and the American Revolution are right around the corner. And, and that it's just, just that, that, that, that Quintilian, a great master of, of the teaching of rhetoric, which after all was basis of a lot of higher education in, in Rome, made a comment in his book that she will know or he, he will know himself to have made great progress for whom Cicero is a delight. In other words, whoever is very pleased by Cicero will know herself to have made great progress. And, and, and that's the way I feel like that, that, that, that, that, that Cicero Livy in, in a Lost Work made the comment in talking about Cicero, that to praise Cicero adequately, to praise Cicero with the eloquence that he deserved would require a second Cicero to do that. And I think that's one of the most insightful and important things that anybody has ever said about Cicero. Because the way I parse that statement is that if you really want to learn rhetoric, if you really want to learn, if you really want to Learn to be persuasive. You read the speeches of Cicero, not just because he's a master of anaphora and all sorts of other rhetorical tricks, devices, methods, vocabulary, organization. Not just because of that, but because if you can defend Cicero, if you can defend him, you will be eloquent. In other words, that there's certain subjects that are diff. In other words, if you're really trying to defend the proposition that it's better to go back down into the cave where they could kill you, you crucify you, and stick you up on a tree and murder you, that, that. That it's that. That. That it would be better to be a just man who appears unjust than to be an unjust man who appears perfectly just. If you could actually persuade somebody to do that. And of course, that's the burden that's put on Socrates and Plato's Republic. You'd have to be a pretty eloquent guy to persuade somebody to sacrifice themselves for a greater good and to incur death and wounds when you could live a perfectly happy life by doing your own thing. That takes some rhetorical skill. And the way I look at Cicero is that Cicero bequeathed himself to the future as a problem, as a complex human individual. He did, after all, invent the term humanities as those subjects which conduce to the development of our own humanity. And Cicero was eminently human. Human. You know, there's. There's no Superman in him. Luckily, we've got all of these personal letters that he wrote, some of them to his best friend, in which you see him in all manner of moods. You know, sometimes he's feeling great because he's just won a law case, and other times he's, you know, I don't know, suicidal. He's, I think the word would be despondent and highly depressed and with everything in between. And we know about his marriages and we know about his children, and we know more about him than any other ancient person. That's the bottom line. Like, he's this very richly complicated dude. And I think part of the reason a lot of people don't like him. Well, part of the reason is that if you're forced to learn Latin by, I don't know, studying the first Catalinarian oration, and you listen to him boasting about, you know, that if that's your introduction, you could grow tired of him, I suppose, Latin. Maybe you just were bored with Latin. I don't know that I've lost my train of thought. But the point is that it's kind of easy not to like Cicero. And that one of the reason and one of the secret reasons that I think people don't like Cicero is it's too damn hard. There's too much that it's a lot easier to say Cicero was a lightweight, a kind of lightweight philosopher that supported a moribund republic and was, you know, overly weak and caused his own downfall. Or better yet, you know, was like an inconsequential guy who just happens to supply some good information that we need, but was like a blow hard that didn't really do very much. And take your pick, when there are many other versions of that, is that the bottom line is to read all of Cicero, you know, all 30 volumes of him in the Loeb Library. That's a daunting thing to do do. And so it's kind of easier to just say it if you re, if, if people, if you really loved Cicero. He learned from Cicero. And of course many people have said that. Anyway, I think somewhere or other I answered your question.
- [43:55]
Joseph Liss
No, certainly and no. Yeah, I mean he's, he's a very complex figure and there's, there's no, it's not, you know, on the one hand, I mean, he's Cicero, like his political views. He was against domestic taxation, for example. He' he kind of, he bristled at the thought of redistributive taxation or land redistribution or anything like that. And yet, you know, when the chips are down, he is willing to, you know, put to death blue blooded traitors against Rome without, you know, without trial, as he did in the Catiline conspiracy. And that obviously. So the sources of hostility toward Plato are as complex as he himself is, because that hostility has come. I mean, you can talk later about some modern scholarship that's been hostile to Cicero in different ways and for different reasons. Some for reasons of finding him inconsequential, some for reasons of finding him in interference with the destiny of Roman imperial development. But let's move for the moment to talk about Plato the philosopher. So tell us a bit about the prevailing schools of the philosophical scene in Cicero's time.
- [45:19]
William Altman
Okay, good. So by the way, you made a nice slip there because you talked about using Plato's philosophy, but I don't see them as different and we'll get to that in a minute. But I mean, the prevailing schools at the time were the Epicureans and the Stoics. The Alexandrian school there still remained an academy, but Sulla destroyed it. Sulla captured Athens and burnt all the trees in the Academy to the ground. And usually we say that the end of the academy was because of Sulla and the destruction of Athens. So this is going on at his. At Cicero's time. Cicero had already been a student at the academy when is that right? Yeah, I can't. I don't actually remember that. Yeah, he had been at Athens before Sulla described. I'd have to look that up. I, I definitely don't remember ever teaching that. And anyway is that the dominant schools of thought were the Stoics and the Epicureans at the time and that Cicero. And that the legacy of Plato which, which Cicero quickly attached himself to was split between the last skolark of the academy whose name was Philo of Larissa, not to be confused with Philo of Alexandria and a student of Philo's named Antiochus who claimed that there were. That the parallels between Stoicism and the. And legitimate Platonism were so close that. That a new amalgam was possible. And, and. And Cicero is our primary source for both of these guys. That, that, that, that, that most of what we know about Philo of Larissa and most of what we know about Antiochus of Escanlon. And by the way, when I taught three democracies, I, I don't. These guys were barely mentioned. I didn't go into the deep. The historic. The, the. The. The history of philosophy approach to Cicero. The, the history of philosophy approach to Cicero is. Is characteristic of the way the man is treated generally is that the way historians of philosophy proceed, generally speaking, is that they take the data about Philo and Antiochus they from Cicero. They elevate those guys to crucial and important positions in the history of Platonists. And then they see Cicero as a minor epigone of both despite the fact that he's our primary source for both. And, and the idea that Cicero went back to Plato and discovered the real Plato for himself. In other words, neither went the direction of what we call new academy skepticism of which Philo was a exponent or a more dogmatic Platonism that found Platonism in harmony Germany with Stoicism, which Cicero didn't do that either. That, that, that, that instead of seeing that he rediscovered the real Plato for himself, which by the way is my position is that the history of philosophy triangulates between those two things and finds them a waffling guy that is closest to a character named Cicero that Cicero invented in his later dialogues called Cicero, who's a kind of bumbling, amiable, but you know, kind of doubting that doesn't think we can really find the truth, but what we should strive for is to find the thing that's closest to the truth. And he writes dialogues that have Epicureans in them and Stoics in them, and he kind of tacks between them and gives angles of the Epicureans that makes them look a little better than they normally do. And little angles on the Stoics that make them look a little better than they normally do. And that he's just this kind of waffling, eclectic guy that. Very similar to the character in his dialogues named Cicero, which is why my book was called the. Since you. Me. Since you mentioned my. My book. The. That. That. The Invention of Cicero, that they. They didn't let me put the right title that's supposed to be called the Invention of Cicero. I wanted quotations around the word Cicero. The invention of the character Cicero. Cicero. The way I look at that, by the way, is that Cicero was so loyal to Plato that he wrote dialogues and thought that that was the best way to teach and that the character of Socrates that enabled Plato to write these completely delightful dialogues. Where, you know, Cicero is. I mean, the ancient word is ironic, but he's often just extremely rude. There's a great New Zealand scholar, his name temporarily escapes me, but who made the breakthrough observation that the reason Cicero's dialogues do not resemble Socratic dialogues is because they were said in Rome. And that there was a level of rudeness from Socrates that wouldn't be tolerated by the interlocutors if there was anything like a realistic dialogue set in Roman Rome where Cicero's dialogues are said, of course, and are written in Latin. The. That. What. C. That Cicero solved that problem by creating his version of Socrates. And his version of Socrates was Cicero. That. That, that. That there. There are a lot of amnesiac things that come when you. When you. When you study. Study Cicero. Like one of them is that you learn that. That you learn that Antiochus is a towering figure in the history of what's called Middle Platonism. And you tend to forget that Cicero, you know, we've got 10 volumes of him. We've got, you know, 150 fragments of Antiochus, of which half of them at least are from Cicero himself. More so you get this kind of imbalance where Philo and Antiochus become the great figures and we look at Cicero in their context instead of looking them in his context. That's number one. Number two, you've got the, you know, the character of Cicero, who is just taken to be the real guy instead of the very. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Cicero is the guy writing the dialogue. He's not the character called Cicero in the dialogue. He's the guy writing the dialogue, for goodness sake. And it's amazing how, how uncommon it is to get that distinction made. And then of course, he has some really good sound bites like, I don't know, in the, in the Orator one, one of his rhetorical works. And, and by the way, it was very important to my approach to Cicero to say that his oratorical works were extremely important philosophical works because he was trying to persuade the reader to go back down into the cave and become an active politician. In other words, to practice what he do to make pre. He was preaching what he himself had practiced, which, which makes him right off hand a very interesting guy. And, and as I said, Plato's rival, or rather Quintilian, called him Platonus Amulus, Plato's rival, because he, he, he, he didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk. He didn't just write dialogues. He went down into the cave and, and by the way, was killed there parenthetically, you know, was killed there in accordance with the, you know, the canonical, you know, story that, that Glaucon tells in book two of Plato's reproduction Republic. So, so I guess that, that, that's kind of a second thing about, about Cicero with the inv. The invention of a character Cicero and identifying him as the author of the dialogues. And then finally is just Cicero, you know, as a Platonist. And that since, since Platonism is not, not in fashion. I mean, it's quite interesting right now is that there's a big revival in the academy in the, in the field of ancient philosophy. A lot of interest in the Stoics, and I would say a revival, I, I, I, and, and, and Cicero tends to get pushed aside. You know, he, he, he's an important source for certain aspects of Stoicism. But I mean, Cicero is a source for a lot of, of stuff. But, but you kind of miss the real man. You kind of miss the, the, the, the guy that holds it all together, which is of course Cicero that, that I referred to earlier when you need all these different academic disciplines to really understand the guy. Did I answer your question?
- [54:20]
Joseph Liss
Yeah, I think so. I mean, so these, this, the character of Cicero that Cicero kind of develops for himself in his dialogue. So I mean, this is created essentially to be caused by these schools of the Stoics and the skeptics are more current. So he creates this Persona in order to make it I guess more generally palatable while also establishing this kind of more esoteric layer of what he thinks of as the real Platonism that's kind of submerged beneath the more fashionable veneer.
- [54:57]
William Altman
Yeah, well, look, first of all, as an old public school teacher, I gotta say I'm not happy with your pronunciation of the word Platonism. Excuse me, like, we'll get into discussion of Emanuel can't in a few minutes. Sorry about that, that, that. But, but, but you know, what you said is, is so I got a little sidetracked by, by, by that. Sorry about that. But, but that, but you put it exactly right is that, that and, and, and by the way, what I, which I clearly didn't know when I was teaching it back when I was a kid and to kids even younger than I was. The turning point is actually the dialogue De Legibus on the Laws where the character Cicero is still a Platonist, like, is still a Platonist and celebrated as such. And so he's actually defending something that he believes and, and it's dry compared to that, that, that, that, that when you, when you look at dialogues like the Tusculan Disputations, where he actually doesn't even call the Cicero character, he doesn't even call him Cicero. But, but, but everybody thinks it is Cicero. He's pretty stoic. That, that, that what it looks like is that to avoid. Here's a paradox about Cicero is, is that people that study him as a historical figure, in other words, study his speeches and the, the political speeches, they come away with the idea that he was a pompous windbag that was always bragging about how important he was because he had defeated the blue blood conspiracy of Cataline. When you turn to the guys that write about his philosophy, all of a sudden he's this bumbling new academy skeptic that has no strong views at all. All. And doesn't really, you know, doesn't act like he's the smartest guy on the block. Far from it. It's just this muddling eclectic that, you know, is just. Well, I don't know, but this seems most plausible. But I could be wrong, like kind of like that and that, you know, putting these two guys together is something that, you know, the philosopher, the hist, the historians of philosophy tend to not, you know, if, if, if you asked. I mean, there are guys that have written books about Cicero that if you ask them what year was he ideal and what was the year of the, you know, against varies or you know, like what, what's up with the Manilan Law, they. I don't think they'd know. And conversely, if you ask people that have read all of his letters and can create a Roman prosopography on the basis of all the people mentioned in the Odd Familiaris and about the. The Manilan law and his support for Pompey, if you ask them to parse the, you know, like, what is the status of the character M in the Tusculan disputations, they would be at a loss, too. So this is kind of the problem, it seems to me. So, yeah, it looks to me like hall is his name Jonathan hall in New York Zealand. He teaches at Otago University. Great Cicero scholar who's created a great student in Sha McConnell. If. If you want to study Cicero, I would get you to New Zealand. These guys are Cracker Jack. They're the best in the world. And John hall was the guy that made this crucial breakthrough about the dialogues of Cicero and about why they had to be. He doesn't apply it to the question you asked, but I don't know how John would feel about my extending Hallism. But I suggest that the creation of Cicero was to continue this veneer of politeness that was necessary to persuade his readership to take him seriously and to think and that if he had just come across as a dogmatic, know it all Greculus, in other words, a little Greek that was spouting Platonism, pure and simple, that he wouldn't have had any effect whatsoever.
- [59:15]
Joseph Liss
Great, okay. And as you've mentioned, Cicero's works are just immense in volume, can fill a library with them. But there's quite a number of Cicero's works that have been lost and that we don't actually have. We only have indirect evidence of them. So tell us a bit about the life of St. Augustine and tell us.
- [59:35]
William Altman
About.
- [59:38]
Joseph Liss
How all material we have from Augustine kind of tells us about the true intentions of Cicero's philosophy, and particularly about Cicero's lost dialogue, the Hortensius.
- [59:47]
William Altman
Yeah, Right. So, great. So. So probably the most important dialogue of Cicero's that's lost is the Hortensius. And it. It's a particularly important dialogue because it was the first one he mentions. When he gives a catalog of his philosophical writings, everybody can see that it was a protreptic to the study of philosophy. So it's the introductory dialogue that introd the student to Cicero's writings and to philosophy generally, and it's lost. And in his Confessions, Augustine celebrates Cicero and makes the claim that it was reading Cicero's hortensius that led him to God. So the idea that Cicero could write a prep. Decoration that would lead Augustine to God, it, it's not really consonant with the notion of Cicero as this amiable SC Skeptic that doesn't really know anything. And, and, and you can actually see when I wrote the Cicero book, one of the parts that was most interesting to me was to go through the so called Kasiakum dialogues of Kasiakam dialogues of Augustine where you can really see what the Hortensius was. If you, if you read carefully, it's lost but he quotes it a lot. And I, I guess it's fair to say that that, I mean they have a debate like Augustine's characters have a debate about whether Cicero knows something or doesn't know something. And, and the idea that he knew enough to persuade Augustine to believe in God definitely points on the idea that he knows something anyway. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the interesting thing about the, the I, I, my favorite part of that Brill's companion that, that I put together was that when I, I, I, I was talking about the voluminous quantity of, of Cicero's writings and if I recall correctly what I did was I, I talked about his orations public, political and private. That was, that was two his philosophical writings, his letters and his poetry. So I said that there were five big areas and what, and what I emphasized there was in addition to bifurcating all five of those in various ways, is that what I, the, the big bifurcation that I introduced is that in all of those categories, categories there's substantial things that are lost. There are a whole series of letters exchanged between Cicero and the, and the young Octavian who will become Augustus. They're lost. There are, there are philosophical treatises in addition to the Hortensius. They're gone. His poetry, he, that, that, I mean just because he wasn't as great a poet as the two guys that are about to come along as sycophants to Augustus, the great Virgil, the great Horus. Just because he wasn't as great a poet as, as they are doesn't mean that he wasn't a damn good poet. And you know, maybe looks to me like his hexameter was useful to Virgil and the others in revolution. Anyway, in, in every case very important speeches are lost, both political and, and, and forensic. So it, it's, you know, I just wrote the, I, I just wrote a book about Plutarch, finished a book about Plutarch and you know there's Almost as much Plutarch as there is of Cicero. But the great scholars, FC Sandbach at the beginning of, at the beginning of the Fragments, I think of Plutarch says, you know, considering we've got 26 volumes of Plutarch in the lobe library, it's a sobering thing to realize that more than half of Plutarch is lost and that it's, it's, it's, it's similar in the case of Cicero. So I mean, I'm not going into a lot of details about the Hortensius and the Kaziakum dialogues as maybe your question is directing me to do so. But you know, that would be an interesting thing for your auditors to do if they're at all interested, because the actual content of the debate about Cicero in the Casiacum dialogue to an intelligent reader who looks at the sources of the various comments. As I remember, one of the great errors scholars have made is that they have assumed that, that a skeptical statement, that a skeptical statement belonged in the Hortensius, whereas Augustine, in addition to quoting the Hortensius is also quoting the academic, where it, the Academica is the first place, by the way, where somebody says that Socrates knows that he knows nothing. Like, so Cicero is actually the first guy to say, because I mean, if you read Plato's apology, that's not how Plato puts it. What, what Plato, Socrates says is that unlike everybody else, I don't think that I know the things that I don't know. In other words, he doesn't make a glaring self contradiction because if you know that, you know nothing. I mean, come on. So, and, and what's beautiful is that in the remains of the Academica he's got Arus, who was a new academy skeptic, saying that, that, that to avoid self contradiction. He didn't even say he knew that he knew nothing. So, so nothing could be clearer like that, that, that, that, that, that, that. Oh, oh, and, and, and in the Academica Cicero says, well I agree with Socrates who said that he knows that he knows that nothing and you know, so yeah, if you read carefully, you got to read Cicero carefully. And that's what I tried to do in the. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5 only at McDonald's for a limited time. Prices and participation may vary in the Cicero book.
- [66:20]
Joseph Liss
Yeah, and so just along the lines of, you know, this evidence in Cicero that kind of clues us in that there's a deeper teaching beyond the apparent level, beyond his apparent skepticism. Tell us a little bit about the dream of Scipio, how this fictional dream kind of conveys Cicero's true political and philosophical commitments.
- [66:47]
William Altman
Yeah, well, this is the, this is the key thing. It's the, it's the key thing. So Cicero wrote a republic de Republica. Most of it is lost. A generous portion of it was rediscovered in 1820, but the only part of it that was widely known is the so called dream of Scipio, the Somnium skip that was preserved as part of a commentary by a Neoplatonic philosopher by the name of Macrobius. And it was well known. The Somnium Scipionus is the story of a dream that Scipio has where he goes to sleep and he's wafted up into the heavens and rises to such a lofty height that he looks down and sees the world as just one tiny globule among many, sees that the Roman Empire is but a tiny part of that tiny globule and is haranged by his ancestors master, an elder Scipio who schools him and he wants to stay in the heavens and listen to the beautiful music, in other words, the so called harmony of the spheres, which some of the greatest passages in the history of that beautiful idea, in other words, the idea that the planets as they revolve, put forth each of them a note and that there's a harmony that's created by that when he hears it and it's explained to him by his ancestor that you can't hear it on Earth but that you can hear it now. He wants to stay in the heavens and listen to that beautiful music. And his ancestor says, nope, down you must go, you, you know, you, you. And in the context that he's going to be killed by his kinsman, the Gracchi in this case, or one of the Gracchi, I think it was Kaas anyway, that, that, that the whole idea is that he's wafted up to the heavens and that his ancestor sends him back down to do what he's stuck stuff. Now when you read Plato's Republic, it's got 10 books. Cicero's Republic had six. The Somnium Scipionis was in the sixth book. In other words, it was the end, it was the end of Cicero's Republic. And Macrobius, the Neoplatonist who wrote a commentary on the Somnium Scipionis is particularly interested in all of the music of the spheres, planetary cosmological Elements in the myth of which the are plenty. But it's not the heart of the story that the heart of the story is the rise and the return which any Platonist can recognize who's, you know, taken seriously the opening word of Plato's Republic. In other words, I went down and has just situated that in the context of the allegory of the cave. Anyway, the Macrobius identified the Somnium Scipio Jonas with the myth of er, which is the final myth in Plato's Republic in book 10. And so he doesn't mention the allegory of the cave. He doesn't see any parallels to the allegory of the cave, but he sees clear parallels to the myth of er. And to me, this is one of the most amazing facts in the history of philosophy is that people have just followed that. They just followed, followed that. They followed the authority of Macrobius. And it doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody except some dumb public high school teacher in the United States who, you know, summarized the. Some, you know, put an excerpt of the Dream of Skipio in his ninth grade citizenship course after already exposing them to the allegory. Like, was obvious to all of my students where Cicero got the idea because I put the cave and then at the end of the Athens section, I put the Somnium skip at the end of the Cicero section. And it was. It's. It's like so obvious. Obvious. It's so obvious. And it's been completely overlooked. It's just been completely overlooked. The parallels. There's a guy named Jed Atkins who got his Ph.D. i think at. Did he get it at Duke? No, I guess he's a professor at Duke. Anyway, in his. He wrote a book. He's, he's, he's set fair to be a very important American Cicero scholar. He was kind enough to cite me on this point. Point. That's the closest I. That's the closest I've come to getting recognition for what I regard as not only something obvious, but as the, the, the literal key to Cicero. The key to Cicero is the Somnium Scipionus because it shows the parallel to the allegory of the cave and makes sense of Cicero's entire life. There's a guy by the name of Walter Burkart who wrote a book called, you know, know, kind of Cicero, the Platonica or in which the opening sentence is, you know, despite claims of some people that Cicero was a Platonist, you know, he never mentions the allegory of the cave. And in a literal sense that's true. He, he never does mention the allegory of the cave and yet his whole life is the allegory of the cave. And the Somnium Scipionus is so clearly, well, I mean clearly to me derived from, from the cave. And so I guess I would add that as almost as important as the other errors. You know, in other words, the error of looking at Cicero in the context of Antiochus and Philo of Larissa instead of the opposite. The error of identifying Cicero with the eclectic skeleton skeptic that he calls Cicero in his late dialogues. The error of thinking that he wasn't a Platonist in a way we could just collapse that into. This is a third which is the Somnium Scipionis, which really is the greatest proof of what it was all about. And what's amazing is that since Macrobius commentary was largely cosmological on the basis of the cosmological or astronomical details in the Somnium Scipio Leonas which are there as they are in the myth of er, which is, I mean I'm not saying he was crazy for linking them, that that's plausible. It, it, it, we, we, and we can see why Macrobius would do that because of his interest. But to not emancipate yourself from Macrobius, especially when Cardinal mai discovered in 1821 on a palimpsest of some commentary, but maybe it was by Augustine, I can't remember some commentary on the Psalms where it was written on the back back or the erased copy of something that contained a, a large number of otherwise lost fragments from Cicero's De Republica fragments which the whole dialogue begins by saying, you know, that somebody comes in say hey have you heard about the latest astronomical discovery? And you know, the, the lead guy in the dialogue says well I don't care about, as I don't care about astronomical discoveries. I'm more interested in versus virtue and the state of our own Roman Republic. I'll leave that to the scientists. I don't give a. About that. Let's, let's, let's, let's put cosmology to the side. So despite the fact that we rediscovered that they continued to read the, the beat goes on, the march goes on of ignoring, of ignoring this very basic element of, of Cicero. So thanks for asking about the Somnium. It's, it's, it's the, it's the key. And, and you know, I just invite your auditors, you know, to go back and read it in the context of the cave. Really isn't rocket science to have Drawn attention to that parallel.
- [74:23]
Joseph Liss
Right. And the, the as a reminder, the text of Cicero, that. That's from, that's from Deus.
- [74:29]
William Altman
No, it's from De Republica. Oh, God.
- [74:31]
Joseph Liss
De Republic. All right, so, yeah. As we're moving into Cicero's later works. Yeah. Talk a little bit about how the deaths of two important people to Cicero, the death of Cato and the death of Cicero's daughter Tullia. How do they motivate the final phase of Cicero's writing?
- [74:51]
William Altman
Well, you know, the death of Cato is more political. Cato was inflexible but amiable fellow. In some respects, the death of Cato was marginally unimportant in comparison to his daughter's death. But I'll just say a word about Cato is that Cicero wrote a treatise called the Cato. It's lost. Caesar responded to Cicero's praise for Cato in what was called the Anti Cato, which is also lost. It's important for seeing the difference between Cicero and Caesar. Cato himself is an interesting and problematic character in the fall of the Roman Republic. As Cicero pointed out that it wasn't so much the enmity between Pompey and Caesar that caused the collapse of the Republic, it was their deadly friendship when they formed the first triumph for it. And certainly on the basis of Plutarch and my own intuitions, it seems to me that Cato was very important in driving Pompey into the arms of Caesar, which as Cicero realized was the disaster. Was the disaster. So, you know, Cato is a problematic character. Cato is the guy that as Plutarch. Plutarch's life of Cato is beautiful. He's a more likable guy than Cicero. And yet, and yet, and yet like that, that, that would be a good exercise, especially since you mentioned Plutarch's treatment of Cicero. You know, if you read, if you, if you went back and reread the life of Cicero against the life of Cato and tried to figure out, you know, what, where's, what's Plutarch's position here? Like, how does he feel about these two guys? Is a curse on both your houses. He's critical of both in some way. Like, where does he really stand that. I think that's a really good question to think, Think about that. You know, before committing suicide, Cato read Plato's Phaedo. Well, Plato's Phaedo as the first argument against suicide. In it, you. The, the, the, the great comment that, that Cicero. It's not, it's not Is it in. Yeah, it's in Plutarch. It's in Plutarch where Cicero says, oh, no, no, no, it's not. It's in a letter to ask Atticus where he says, you know, our friend. Our friend Cato is doing more harm to the republic than good. You know, like, he acts like he's living in Plato's ideal city instead of in fakey. In the feces of Romulus, which to me, like, that's my response to the whole glorification of the Roman republic thing in Fike Romuli, in the. Of Romulus. That, that, that. I think Cicero. Look, as a Platonist, what you got to be, if you're a Platonist, is you got to make a really sharp distinction between where the beautiful ideas are, like the idea of the good and beauty and justice. And they're elsewhere. They're like elsewhere and then down here, you know, in the shadows of the cave. And you can't be a Platonist if you're blurring that distinction. Like, you can be a Neoplatonist, or you can be a quasi Platonist, or you can be an anti. Aan. Stoic Platonist, but if that line gets blurred, not. Nope, I refuse to accord. I won't even call it Platonism. No, no, we could call it Platonism because that's like flattening it out. Anyway, I lost my train of thought looking at your face there. What was I saying?
- [78:34]
Joseph Liss
I believe you were talking about the importance of the distinction between the form of the good itself. And so you're getting into something from distinction, distinct from making that distinction as a Platonist.
- [78:47]
William Altman
Yeah. Oh, so, so, so. So in other words, Cato doesn't do Cato's Platonism like Neoplatonism or like Walter Burkhardt's Platonism or Plotinus's Platonism, that like. Which we'll call Platonism is that. That all of those guys are. Are blur. Are blurring that. Whereas, whereas Cicero makes the great comment about. It makes it about Socrates and the Tusculus, where he says, you know, Socrates found philosophy dancing about in the heavens, careening about in the Celestia, and he brought it down. He brought it down into the cities, into the lives of men. And that not only has the going back down into the cave element and the descent, but the rejection of cosmology, which is again, one of the great ironies of the Macrobius, cosmic commentary. One of the mistakes I think, that people make in the history of philosophy, and I made it for many years, is that you look At a guy like Sir Isaac Newton writing a book called I don't know what, Principia Mathematica Philosophii Naturalis, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. And you see that there was no distinction in his mind between philosophy and science. And that. That's kind of this weird bifurcation that's taken place. And what I didn't realize at the time is that from the very beginning of philosophy, there was no bifurcation between philosophy and science. That the first philosopher, Thales and Anaximander and Anaximan, they were all cosmologists, and that the real break was to make a break between philosophy and science. And that's Socrates. Socrates makes that break. I'm not interested in showing that the cosmos, God. Right now I'm working on Philo of Alexandria and is a man after my own heart who just plainly understands that, you know, the big break is, is not worshiping, not being a Chaldean and finding God in the cosmos. He. He's. He's way better at that than anybody else. He sings the song I've been trying to sing for two years in all of my books, and he just sings it beautifully and sang it 2,000 years ago. I love that guy. Anyway.
- [81:15]
Joseph Liss
The other part of my question.
- [81:16]
William Altman
Oh, oh, no, no, let's get to Tullia. So we dealt with Cato. Tully is the key. Oh, my gosh. You know, at the. At the beginning of the Catalinarians, the first Catalinarian, he says, you know, he looks out at him and says, I see all your faces directed at me and you're concerned about. About me because, you know, like on the hit. On the hit list of these Catalinarian guys, that's. He doesn't say that, but that's in the background. And I see you worried about me, and that's gratifying to me. I'm glad that you're worried about me, but forget it. You know, look to yourselves and your children. Don't. Don't worry about me. As far as what? That, that. That. That. I only took on this con. I only took on this consulship because I'd been persuaded that it was the right thing to do and that if I need to bear all of the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune, and if he actually uses the word crus, like if that. That. That if I undergo, you know, undergo torture on the torture stake as the Jehovah's Witnesses call the cross of Jesus, I will gladly bear them as long as through my labor neighbors, that the dignity and safety of The Roman. Roman people may be pariato or brought. Brought to birth. To me, Cicero's greatest achievement was the understanding that women are better Platonists than men. Tullia died in childbirth. She died in childbirth. His favorite daughter died in childbirth. He already had heaped praise on Talia. In Latin, the word virtus is. Got the word for man in it, like a veer is a man. And the only time virtus is applied to a woman before Cicero is in the comedies. If I. I think it's in both Plotus and Terence might be in only one of them where it's like, applied to, you know, like the bearded madam of a brothel, you know, like somebody that's got a lot of male features as a joke, you know, like it's a joke for a woman. It's kind of the way people used to use the word dyke. So it's like it's. It's an insult. He. He attributes virtus to his daughter with a straight face and her virtus and her humanitas, both which, by the way, are. Were considered by Caesar to be the opposite. Cicero Caesar, at the beginning of the Gallic wars, divides famously Gaul up into three parts. And he says, of these three, the bravest are the Belgae, on account of the fact that they are farthest away from the humanity of the province. And least often to them do merchants come bringing those things that conduce to effeminizing minds. So I've long thought of. Of writing a book called a Sexual Revolution, in which I would use the great Eliac poets, climaxing with Ovid, to tell a story about how there was a sexual dimension that was going on in the fall of the Roman Republic, and that. That. That there was a rise of people that were more sensitive to what we now call homosexuality, which was not exactly a category for them, but you can see it rising, especially in Virgil and in Catullus, and that an estimation of women and Cicero's consolatio on the death of Tullia is lost. But he claimed in that loss, we know, that he wanted divine honors for his daughter. In other words, he thought his daughter had achieved not just virtual virtus and humanitas, but had done something that he was willing to call divine. And what she did was, is that she died in childbirth. And what I believe happened is that she died in childbirth happily under the belief that her little boy was going to survive her, and therefore that she was happy to lay down her life. Life. As Jesus would say, greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for another. And one of my favorite parts in the Cicero book, it's in a footnote where I quote Vince Lombardi as saying, you know, there's no greater, there's no greater emotion for a man than to have given your all and, and, and, and to lie on the, on the football. He, I don't think he calls it football, but like on the place of battle, exhausted and victorious. And, and my comment, you know, that men have to invent wars and sporting events to give themselves the same feeling that every woman that's given birth to a child has every time she gives birth to a child, where you give your all in pain and agony and are happy to do it because you're producing this new life. That, that kind of altruism, that willingness to lay down your life for not Cicero not knew that was Platonism and, and that that when, when Tullia died in childbirth, happily, he recognized Cicero was a lonely guy. That this is something that I don't think people quite get considering he wrote letters to hundreds of people and was gregarious and got elected and did a lot of handshaking and knew a lot of people's names. He was essentially a lonely guy. His best friend Atticus was an epicure. Cato and the rest of the Stoic, the nobility, they looked down on him. The guy that he bent around his whole life to defend, Pompy betrayed him. His, his, his marriage was unhappy. He was killed eventually by a guy that he had groomed to be a republican hero, Octavian. It was a lonely life in, in many respects, respects. And I think the life of a Platonist is often a lonely life. But I think that with Tullia, he felt like he had a real soulmate, that that what, what she had done was that he could identify with that and that for the rest of his life he was going to create for her an adequate shrine. He called it a thanum in Latin. And I had already published some articles on his late philosophy, especially in the Tusculans and the, and the Golly Day Definibus, two of his dialogues that, that, that just looked at them in the context of T's death and a few people that, that that idea has been picked up a little bit more. I think some feminist scholars have found that a kind of a slightly appealing idea idea. But, and, and I, I think it's, I, I guess what I, I, I, what I coined as the, the, the phrase I coined for that was womanly humanism. I, I don't know that Cicero invented it. There's a nice. I think it's. Is it 2 5? Anyway, it's in Xenophon's memorabilia. I think it's 25 or 26 where Socrates has a dialog with his son. You know, Plato never really mentions the name Xantippe and doesn't make clear that she was a notorious scold and an irksome person. As Shakespeare says, be she as cursed and shrewd as Socrates, Xanthippe or a worse is that, you know, that's not on the basis of Plato, that's on the basis of Xenophon. And the greatest passage about Xanthippe is in the memorabilia book too, where Socrates, son, just says, I can't put up with my mother anymore. I'm never going to talk to her again. She's too mean. She gives me tongue lashings. She beards my feelings like I can't deal with her. And Socrates says something like, does the word gratitude mean anything to you, son? Like, didn't she take. Didn't she give birth to you? Didn't she take care of you when you were sick? Didn't she administer to your needs before, you know, you even knew how to express them? And with no expectation that you'd ever pay her back. In other words, womanly. And you can see traces of what I call womanly humanism and Dima's speech in the Symposium Museum. But. But I think that Cicero was. It's too bad that we're missing the consolatio, is all I can say. And there's a. In his. In one of his earliest works, De Inventione, there's a marvelous passage at the very beginning, where, where it begins with. I've often wondered whether. Whether rhetoric is a good thing or a bad thing, and whether people have gotten more good out of rhetoric or bad out of it. Because, you know, when I. When I think about the history of our republic and other more ancient polities, I can see that a lot of the damage done to them was done by eloquent and unscrupulous men. On the other hand, you know, treaties have been made, cities have been founded, alliances have been formed. And I got to think that that has something to do with the power of speech. Speech. So, you know, I've come to the conclusion that, you know, rhetoric, when it's misused, it's terrible, but that a mutant, voiceless wisdom without rhetoric is useless. And. And he uses this example. It must have been a great and powerful speech that persuaded a strong man to accept justice without a fight. And when you look at the actual wording of that and the way he looks at the word veer, the vidilicate veer that it looks to me like Cicero realized that the founder of humanity was a woman. In other words, that I, I don't know how fashionable it is to defend feminism on the grounds of mamalian birthing. I don't think Judith Butler would be that into that and I'm sure that there are many other feminists that would think that that was kind of recalcitrant from me. The idea that women are superior to men on the basis of the. I mean, I guess what Cicero taught me is that, that, that you know, every idiot can follow along Thomas Hobbs and Charles Darwin and say man is an animal and let nature red and tooth and claw and that it's a dog eat dog world. And you know, Romulus pushes Remus out of the way and you know, it's a. The nice guys finish last and all of that stuff. And that human nature is basically selfish. What I think what Cicero taught me is that the notion that human nature is essentially selfish completely ignores the idea if man is an animal, man is a mammal. And a mammal is defined by the mammary glands, in other words words defined by the care of the young, the nurturing of the young. And that to have that capacity built in, whether you exercise it or not, even if you become a disciple of Judith Butler and decide that sex is a construct or whatever that I think Cicero discovered that women have a better chance at understanding Platonism than guys do. There guys are more in the the the the the. What I learned from Cicero is, is the the the the the solution to the. To the. To the whole conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg. A famously insoluble problem. And that that what we've all been sold a bill of goods because we've been brought up with an Anglo inspired the human nature that makes the chicken come first. Excuse me, makes the egg come first. In other words, the, the the Romulus and Remus pushing each other out of the way to get the mother's tit has become the, the metaphor for what human nature is essentially selfish. And what I learned from Cicero is that the condition for the possibility of the selfish self aggrandizing, competitive sucker is the generous maalan sucker jockey that gives these guys something to suck. And that the most human Roman was the wolf in the story of Romulus and Remus that took these guys with whom she shared no genetic connection, no selfish gene. To quote Mr. Dawkins, to bind her to these two stinky, crying, bloody little blobs on the ground and fed. Fed them because it was the human thing to do. It was the altruistic human thing to do. Humanitas. And that's Cicero's great discovery, is that humanitas and virtus are the same and that they came together in Tullia. And that Cato, for all of his nobility and excellence and abstemiousness and trumpeted virtue, is less noble than that new, new man from Arpum who laid down his life and defended the Roman Republic and set an inspiring example for. And as long as there are republics, there will be lovers of Cicero. And as long as republics are in deadly danger and falling into dark night, the academy that deals with Cicero will misconstrue him, will marginalize him, will fail to recognize his heart and reduce him to the level of. Of. Of. You take your pick. From Hegel to Droysen to Momson to. To Gruen to. To Strasberg to whatever, to their students. Now, where Cicero, to say nothing of what happens. Him in the philosophy department. Cicero, the skeptic. Cicero, Skepticism. Cicero.
- [95:37]
Joseph Liss
All right, so, yeah, to bring it all back together finally with the. So you've spoken about the one side of the essence of Platonism being that altruism, this, you know, the womanly humanism of just kind of being willing to die for the sake of another. But the other side of it is there's a great importance to the public and political use of eloquence and rhetoric that your book underlines. This is very crucial for some. Cicero, in his own comparison of himself to Plato. And Plato, of course, you know, withdrew from the public, perceiving his political context to be very adverse to himself, and he somewhat withdrew into teaching and writing. So, yeah, I'll just quote a brief passage from your book on page 36 where you write, cicero believed, and there is some reason to think that he proved his outlandish precept by his own practice, that the idealist philosopher who serves the res publica must not only strive to master rhetoric, but is the only one who can do so and is therefore the most eloquent and the most humane of men. So, in other words, I mean, you find that Cicero rejects this familiar association of rhetoric with sophistry in favor of a kind of higher union between rhetoric and the most noble form of philosophic acquiescence, activism. So tell us a bit about that.
- [97:00]
William Altman
Yeah, well, great. I mean, I Mean, in a way, it all goes back to, it goes back to Demosthenes. And when I wrote the Cicero book, you know, Cicero repeatedly makes the claim that Demosthenes, the greatest Athenian orator and clearly Cicero's model for Greek eloquence and therefore eloquence. He repeatedly insists that Demosthenes was a student of Plato's at the end academy. And a very formative moment in my life was when I looked at, when I looked at that claim that Cicero had made in a commentary on the Brutus, one of his, one of Cicero's philosophical treatises dedicated to Brutus, as I said earlier, where, where he, he's quoted the passage where he's saying that, you know, Demosthenes was an auditor of Plato's at the Academy. Me and A.E. douglas wrote the following words. He said, a claim as universally upheld in antiquity as it has been denied in modernity. And I was very fortunate to have. There's I. My Demosthenes book which is just called Plato and Demosthenes. Like when I wrote the Cicero book, I didn't, I didn't make a big effort to prove that Demosthenes had been Plato's student. It was enough that Cicero thought that because that was a key to the idea that philosophy and rhetoric are not enemies, despite what a superficial reading of say for example, the Gorgias might indicate. You know, where Sisera, where Socrates attacks Gorgias, the master of rhetoric. That, that. But then after I'd written the Cicero book, I went on and wrote a book about Demosthenes and like I'm bey beyond the. Oh well, I'll accept it as true because Cicero thought so. Like, it's just, I think it's true and of course it creates a revolutionary new approach to, to, to the reading of, well, not just of Demosthenes but of Plato. My, my Demosthenes book has only been reviewed once. It was reviewed by, I thought, a very prescient young man who was writing for. Is one of the editors of Virgeland View, which I could commend to your auditors. It's called pap. It's called. I think it's the coinage he made is patriotic Platonism. And it's a very nice and insightful review that builds on what I say goes beyond it and in a way that is real interesting and nice anyway, the kind of nexus of things is Demosthenes and, and, and, and, and, and what, what that means is that instead of looking at Plato as the opponent of rhetoric as suggested in the Gorgias is To see him as pointing the way towards. By, you know, the allegory of the cave, pointing the way down into a political life without having the guts to have lived it himself, as you just pointed out. See, see, when Quintilian called Cicero Platonis Aemulus, that means Plato's rival not only as a writer of dialogues, but everywhere else. Cicero proves himself to be Plotonus Aemilis. Quintilian ends up being a pretty interesting guy, because Quintilian actually offers a proof that Demosthenes is a student of Plato's because he analyzes perhaps the most famous passage in the most famous speech of Demosthenes, Demosthenes, which is where Demosthenes is being taken to task for persuading the Athenians to fight against Philip of Macedon 12 years before @ the battle of Chaeronea, a battle which they lost. And now he's being attacked by his leading opponent for having recommended that Athens fight that battle which they lost, lost and lost their, their, not just their hegemony, but their freedom of action as a result of that loss. And where the high point of the speech is where Demosthenes says, we did not make a mistake. You did not make a mistake, men of Athens. I, I swear. And, and so, and if I swear like you were expecting him to say, I swear by Zeus or Jupiter, Minerva or whatever says, I swear by the heroes of Marathon as if they were gods of Thermostat, Mopoli and of Salamis, that, that you did not air. You did not make a mistake. In other words, that even if I had known we would lose that battle, I still would have recommended that we fight it, because if we didn't fight it, that would have mean we lost what it meant to be an Athenian. We'd have lost what it meant. And Quigilia just says, who but a Platonist, who but a Platonist could make that argument? And, and, and you know, we're living in a world where more and more people are identifying Platonism with Plato's laws or with the Eliadic stranger or with the Timaeus. You know, we don't have to go into all the battles you have to fight to defend Plato's Platonism from Plato or the late Plato or from Plato's testing or let. We don't. We've already talked about basinistic stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we've already got Demosthenes as the node. And that what I said in that passage that you quoted was a direct, Was a direct borrowing from what I regard as Cicero's. Masterpiece, which is the dialogue in three books called De Oratora, which, by the way, is not part of, you know, my book was called Plato's. Cicero's Later Philosophy. Philosophy. It's not, it's in, it's in his middle period. His masterpiece is in his middle period. It was right after. Well, I won't go into all the details of its, of its political background, but in De Oratora he says to his brother, we've had this debate about rhetoric and in which I've claimed that only a man of great liberal education and philosophy can be truly eloquent. I think Cicero discovered that there were certain topics like altruism or Cicero, that it was so difficult to persuade to make the case for Cicero or altruism or self sacrifice, that you'd have to have real eloquence to do so. And that, that's, that's why you need to have both philosophy and eloquence together. And as for the superficial, you say when you, when, when you start actually making the case for Demosthenes, being a student of Plato's, is that the crucial dialogue to make that case, astonishingly, is the Gorgias. It's clearly the dialogue of Plato that had the greatest effect on Demosthenes. And of course, in the Gorgias, Socrates insists that, you know, most teachers of rhetoric are just like pastry chefs that dish up people what they want to hear and that he conjures up this marvelous image of the trial where the doctor is put on trial. Trial for, for, for, For a child abuse by the, the, the pastry maker, who points out to the jury of children, because there's a jury of children, that this guy has poked you with needles and cauterized you and cut you and dieted you in unpleasant ways, whereas I've given you tasty comforts and given you a lollipop and been nice. This guy is corrupting the. You. He's bad for you. One of the great Platonic images. And when you read Demosthenes, he's the doctor, he's always telling the Athenians, don't send mercenaries up to fight Philip of Macedon. You got to go yourself. You can't beat this guy sitting around. My message is to, you know, stern self sacrifice and austerity. You got to stop playing all this games and spending money on bullshit and build more ships and go up and man them yourself and fight. This would be tyrant. You get off your ass. It's not, not about flattering them. It's, it's the opposite of that. And of course, what that the greatest thing ever. I think the greatest. The, the first truly great thing said about Plato was said by Cicero, who said in the De Oratora the leading character, his name is Crassus, a distant ancestor or great grandfather, I think maybe just grandfather of the Crassus. That rounded out the triumvirate. And a very important guy, by the way, is that Crassus says, I, I read Plato. I read Plato in Athens. And what struck me most about Plato is that Plato was never more eloquent than when attacking rhetoric in the Gorgias because he got the joke. So the, the joke that people don't seem to get about Plato and other words. Plato is against imitation. Plato is against poetry. Poet Plato is against rhetoric. Plato wrote, you know, the guy that wrote the speech of Dima or the apology of Socrates or the great speech of Protagoras and the Protagoras or even the great speeches of Gorgias and the Gorgias to say that he didn't know rhetoric, that didn't. That wrote the speech of Agathon and Ale. And this, the whole Symposium is like one long series of eloquent speeches written by Plato to say that he's against rhetoric. You have to be insane for a guy that spent his life imitating Socrates and then depict Socrates attacking imitation in the Republic. You know, that's why I said at the beginning of my s. Or the end anyway, the first volume of my Plato book that the most important thing a Plato scholar needs is a good sense of humor. And, and Plutarch can take Cicero to task for making too many indiscreet jokes and, you know, for, for, you know, being too demonstrative, as you say. But nobody can deny that he had a good sense of. I thought you Jewish fellas didn't touch pork. You know, like nobody can claim that he didn't have a good sense of humor. And he needed that to, as a good Plato scholar does Aristotle, not Leo Strauss. You know, there are lots of people that have tackled Plato that are humorless and, and, and am musical and that you. That you can't ride that and, and old Cicero, you know, what can I say? I mean, you give me a chance to. When you asked me to do an interview on this, you know, thank you. You know, the book was written back in 2016. I said I could do it in my sleep because I've talked, you know, I've talked about them so, so much. But, but your questions have, you know, I, you, you seem to have brought out everything I want to say about them as usual. I love being interviewed by you. Thank you.
- [108:04]
Joseph Liss
Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much. And so, yeah, to, to wrap us up, I, I, I wondered if is anything you might have to add about, you know, the, the reception of Cicero through the ages and coming of what Cicero might have to sustain us in America's sula resembling moments that we're going through right now.
- [108:25]
William Altman
Yeah, well, I don't know, let me see. I think that pretty near the end of it. Maybe it is the end of it. Yeah. Brutus's funeral oration ending with orator. Is that what it is? Cicero would. This is the last paragraph of the penultimate chapter. Cicero would realize from the beginning that eloquence could and would be held responsible for the wreck of Athens and therefore of the Roman Republic. He used his own name to ensure that this misconception would not go unchallenged. Every single Greek and Roman orator mentioned in the Brutus, no matter how obscure Belz, bears eloquent witness between the lines to the twin born truth. Eloquence cannot exist without liberty, any more than liberty can be replaced, contained without eloquence. It was Cicero's preservation of this insight that ensured that the republic, along with its most eloquent and least obscure defender, would never die. Both Athenian democracy and the Roman republic have received their just share of funeral orations, none more poignant than Cicero's elegiac little Brutus. And therefore their influence survives down to this day. To be sure, it is a telling sign of the weakness of our own republic, to say nothing of our own ingratitude, that we pay such scant regard to Cicero's role in having kept republic republicanism alive during the long dark night initiated by Augustus. But if it is the tragic truth that as long as there are democratic cities, there will either be external threats from a Philip or domestic ones, from a born again Caesar, it is no less less true that those cities will preserve their freedom as long as there lives even one Ciceronian Platonist committed to meeting those threats with the true eloquence that only a good cause can engender in the good. It is for her, for Cicero's surv, for Cicero's surviving daughter, that I have written this book. Well, I made myself cry. That's always a good sign. So that's what I think. And that's my answer to your question. You know, I, I, I'm an old man, I. You're asking me these questions for whatever audience or auditors will hear this podcast. This is, this is as close to my Ms. In a bottle to quote Edgar Allen Poe as, as I'm likely to get. And I, I really appreciate the opportunity to do it. I can't be the guy that, you know, when the best thing we could do to go after DJT is like, implicate him in the Epstein files. Oh, my God. Like, as, as, as. What can I say, you know, when, when the, when our best bet to save the American republic is. Is. Is, is. Is. Is to what's the it is. Is just to say it to your audience. Colbert for president in 2028. Like, when our best hope for a Democrat is not Gavin Newsom or Kamala or, you know, is like some comic, you know, American Zelensky figure that can say nasty things about Trump without appearing to be nasty. The trouble that we're in is, is great. But I believe what I wrote in that paragraph. I mean, I, I, I believe that there, and I'd like to believe it would be a woman. As I said in that last sentence, somebody that took these, took the message of Ciceronian Platonism to heart and acted on it. Because Cicero was alone then, you know, he was lonely then. And it, you know, I, I can't remember who said, you know, one person with courage makes a majority. I don't remember who said it, but I like it. And to try to inspire that person, that's what I've tried to do. And like I said, I'm very grateful to you, Joseph, for, you know, and of course, to any auditors that, that will hear this, you know, just for the opportunity to talk, as it were, in my sleep, about a guy that I, I love. And, you know, to answer, to answer your question is that, you know, Cicero was big in the Renaissance. Cicero was big during the Enlightenment. Cicero has been eclipsed since the failure of the French Revolution. Is he coming back? I don't know. We need him. He lived in time. Just to give you a Ciceronian, an insight that came to me the other day at breakfast is that if the Roman Republic parallel holds for what's going on in the United States right now, that something to watch very carefully is if we start hearing noise that, that young man, I forget, is he going to Columbia or nyu? Where, where is Baron Trump going to college? Do you remember?
- [113:31]
Joseph Liss
Good question. I don't know offhand.
- [113:33]
William Altman
I think it's one of those two. I don't remember. If we start hearing that Barron Trump disagrees with his father about some important things that he, you know, kind of, kind of the Stuff we kind of heard about Ivanka at the time of January 6, that he's kind of breaking with that a little bit and that he's more susceptible to democratic norms and kind of deplorable towards that, that, that, that turn towards authoritarianism that would be associated with his father. If we hear that, we're in more serious trouble than I thought, because, of course, Donald Trump's not going to live forever. Donald Trump is going to die. And the question is, will Trumpism survive? Now, the parallel, of course, is the last time I checked you, we killed Julius Caesar on the Ides of Mar. March. He died, but that didn't kill Caesarism. And in the form of first Mark Anthony. And I take Mark Antony to be something like Donald Trump Jr. Or J.D. van. Let's call him J.D. vance for. Just for fun, who would be the successor if Trump were to die in office, which I don't think he'll do that, that, that the actual successor that's most similar to, to what happened in Rome, in other words, were, gosh, you know, Octavian wasn't even Caesar's son. He was the son of his sister, I think, as I recall. In other words, somebody like Baron Trump, in other words, a youngster that appears to be more Republican and, and Octavian totally fooled Cicero. Cicero's father final attempt was to convert Octavian to being a good Republican. And of course, that didn't work out, and Octavian ended up signing Cicero's death warrant. So the, the, the parallels, that parallel, which only occurred to me very recently, is just kind of weird. But to me, it shows how much we can learn from Cicero and that. I don't know that I'm very confident that the way Cicero is presently being taught is likely to bring that about. But I've done what I could, and you have helped me. You know, I, I've talked more about Cicero in the last, whatever this is. What time is it? 2 hours and 5 minutes than I've done in years. And I really appreciate the opportunity to do that because as you can see, I love the guy and think we're badly in need of him. And, and I just have. I, I, I, I guess what I learned writing the Cicero book is that you just feel clean when you defend Cicero because it's not easy, but it calls forth a certain degree of passion and insight. And, you know, I'm just grateful for the opportunity to be able to do that. And your questions brought that right out, really. Well, Joseph, thank you very much.
- [116:45]
Joseph Liss
Thank you. Thank you. And so with that we will wrap up. I've been speaking with William Altman about his book, the revival of Platonism in Cicero's late philosophy, Platonis, Emulus and the Invention of cicero, published in 2016 by Lexington Books. My name is Joseph Liss. You've been listening to the New Book Network. Thank you all for listening, and be well.