Cicero. The Nature of the Gods

Translated with Introduction and Explanatory Notes by P. G. Walsh. — Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press, 1997. — 1109 p.In recent years Cicero’s philosophical works have enjoyed a modest rehabilitation; the respect they earned in western Europe during the Patristic era, in the medieval period (more patchily), and above all in the years from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, has been partially restored. Our more indulgent and balanced climate once more recognizes him as an amateur philosopher of high culture and intelligence, for whom academic research and publication was always subordinated to political activity, but who returned with enthusiasm to his reading and writing when precluded from participation in affairs of state. The low esteem into which his philosophical writings fell in the nineteenth century was attributable to several factors: first, the general eclipse of his reputation at the hands of Theodore Mommsen, the great nineteenth-century historian of Rome, whose preference was for men ‘of blood and iron’; second, the more rigorous approaches of the scientific historians of that era, who perused the treatises not so much to evaluate them for their intrinsic worth as to reconstruct the Greek sources on which Cicero naturally relied so heavily; and, above all, the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the Greek genius as manifested in every branch of literature and art, so generously acknowledged by literate Romans, which encouraged a patronizing and dismissive judgement of the humbler Roman achievements. Cicero’s own self-deprecating assessment of his studies in 45 BC (‘These writings are mere copies, produced with no heavy labour; I supply only the words, of which I have a rich store’) was often quoted in such condemnations, which tended to drown the temperate judgements of such outstanding scholars as J. S. Reid and J. B. Mayor.
Cicero had no ambition to be an original thinker. The Roman society in which he lived was one to which philosophy had come late; treatises in Latin were virtually confined to recommendations of Epicureanism. His aim was to broaden the horizons of his contemporaries by introducing them to the wide-ranging ideas of the various Greek schools, and to accommodate their thinking within the different cultural framework of Roman tradition. He is therefore to be judged primarily as a Roman transmitter of Hellenistic philosophy, and since so much of the Greek originals has been lost, his work assumes a particular importance on this ground alone. Secondly, in setting these discussions within a Roman frame, he offers valuable insights into traditional Roman modes of thought when they are challenged by these Greek doctrines; as we shall note, this factor assumes particular importance for The Nature of the Gods.