Cicero Transmits Greek Philosophy to the Latin West
Cicero wrote most of the Latin philosophical vocabulary in about eighteen months of enforced idleness. The circumstances were bleak. Caesar had won the civil war, Cicero had backed Pompey and been pardoned, the senate had ceased to matter, and in February 45 BC his daughter Tullia died shortly after childbirth. He withdrew to his villa at Astura and wrote to Atticus that he had nothing left but to read and write. The output of the following year and a half is one of the extraordinary productive bursts in literature: on the ends of good and evil, the Tusculan disputations on how to face death and pain, the nature of the gods, divination, fate, old age, friendship, and duties, written for his son. He was not an original philosopher and did not claim to be. His method was to set out the Greek schools — Stoic, Epicurean, Academic — in dialogue and to judge between them as an educated Roman gentleman. What he had to invent was the language, since Latin had no words for most of it, and the terms he coined or fixed are the ones still used: quality, essence, moral, individual, definition, comprehension, appetite, providence. Every European philosophical vocabulary descends from that improvisation. The Renaissance took its Latin prose style from him, Petrarch found his letters in 1345, and Hume and Voltaire read him as a model. He was killed two years later. He also wrote a Consolation to himself on Tullia's death, which is lost, and planned a shrine to her that he described in letters as a project for her deification. Nothing in the philosophical works suggests that the Stoic arguments about grief did much for him.
- Year: 46 BCE
- Category: Cultural
