The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Finally, Rome had its democratic element in its various popular assemblies, where the Roman people, or plebs, voted “or bestow offices on those who deserve them,” including the two consuls, and “who have the right to award both honors and punishments, the only bonds whereby kingdoms, states, and human society in general are held together.”10

  Taken as a unit, the consuls, Senate, and assemblies formed in Polybius’s mind the perfect “mixed constitution,” meaning a mixture of the best features of all three standard forms of government. “The result is a union which is strong enough to withstand all emergencies,” Polybius wrote; “this peculiar form of constitution possesses an irresistible power to achieve any goal it has set itself.” Following this analysis, Polybius had to conclude, “It is impossible to find a better form of constitution than this.”11

  In short, this rude and crude city built on the banks of the Tiber had managed to craft a political system more perfect than that of the Athenians or Spartans. Yet how could Rome maintain that living perfection and make sure that the judicial mixture of three elements “unite and work together” in the future?

  Here Polybius turned to the second of his authorities, Plato. And here the answer was not so encouraging.

  Polybius went back to the Republic, where in Books VIII and IX Plato gives us his most trenchant analysis of politics as it actually works, as opposed to the utopian ideal he outlined earlier in the work. Socrates warns his listeners that every political system that fails to live up to those ideal principles must eventually be overtaken by an inevitable cycle of decay and collapse. It is a chilling story, made more chilling by the sober, matter-of-fact way Socrates tells it.

  For example, Socrates explains that the dissolute freedom of democracies like that of Athens, “which treats all men as equals whether they are equal or not,” must lead inevitably to moral corruption, civic disorder, and mob rule. He implicitly dismisses Aristotle’s notion that a system based on the idea that those who rule are ruled in turn, if only by the rule of law, will ever work in practice. Instead, democratic man “lives from day to day, indulging in the pleasures of the moment” and refusing to accept any order or restraint, including the restraint of law. The chaos that results will lead inevitably to one-man rule, he says, in order to restore calm.12

  At first, one-man rule will be accepted and even invested with the legal trappings of kingship. However, “the man who tastes a single piece of human flesh,” Socrates says, “is fated to become a wolf.” As the ruler’s appetite for power grows, kingship, too, “degenerates into its corrupt but associated form, by which I mean tyranny” (this is Polybius, not Plato, writing). Tyranny triggers resentment, revolution, and violent overthrow again. Out of the rubble of the rule of One emerges the rule of those who have led the revolt against it, namely a jealous and self-interested aristocracy.

  Yet this, too, eventually decays into something corrupt and ugly, namely the naked rule of the rich, which breeds a bitter wave of resentment among the underprivileged masses. According to Plato, society now splits “into two factions, the rich and the poor, who live in the same place [but] are always plotting against each other.”13 When this class struggle reaches its climax, the poor rise up in their massive numbers to claim power for themselves, and so “democracy is born” again.

  And so it goes, at least according to Plato. As he explains it, the same dreary process repeats itself over and over, an endless cycle (in Greek, the term is anakuklosis) of political birth, decay, revolution, and renewal without end or purpose. This is the dismal cycle, the Republic explains, that all those condemned to live in the cave are fated to repeat. It is this cycle, that only rule by philosophers can ever interrupt or break.

  For the Romans, Polybius argued, this had to be a sobering wake-up call. His Histories subtly transformed Plato’s cycle from a specific theory of government into a general theory of history. This pointless cycle, “described in greatest detail by Plato,” Polybius wrote, had evidently doomed Greece to impotence, as the free city-states of Greece had yielded to the power of Alexander and the Macedonians, which then decayed into warring petty kingdoms and acrimonious intercity feuds, making Rome’s rise to power inevitable.‖ Could Rome expect to evade the same fate? Mixed constitution or not, Polybius regretted to conclude it could not.

  “For this state, [which] takes its foundation and growth from natural causes, will pass through a natural evolution to its decay.” Sooner or later, doom would come to the greatest empire in the world. This is “a proposition which scarcely requires proof,” Polybius grimly wrote, “since the inexorable course of nature is sufficient to impose it on us.”14

  It was a heart-stopping prophecy, in part because Polybius’s picture until then had been so positive and reassuring. In a profound way, Polybius’s prophecy was Greece’s revenge on its Latin conqueror. Polybius had cunningly turned Plato into a dagger that plunged into the heart of Rome’s hopes for the future.

  On the one hand, Rome had the most perfect constitution in history. In fact, Aristotle’s notion of the mixed constitution as distilled by Polybius would pass down from the Romans into the mainstream of Western political thinking, including America’s Founding Fathers.a On the other, Rome was doomed to failure, as Plato turned Aristotle’s formula for constitutional success into a warning. A mixed constitution required every group in society pulling its appropriate weight. Allowing any one element—the monarchical, the democratic, or the aristocratic—to gain undue influence over the other parts became a death knell of doom, and the end of any self-governing republic.15

  The point of Plato’s cycle of conflict and Polybius’s Histories was that sooner or later this overbalancing must happen. There was nothing Romans could do to stop it. The best they could hope for was to learn to “bear with dignity the vicissitudes of Fortunes” and accept their own impotence to control the future. And that is what Roman thinkers, philosophers, and historians for the next four hundred years would try to do. A hole had appeared in the soul of the Romans, which made it impossible for them to enjoy anything they did.

  It may seem incredible that a single idea could have such a devastating impact. However, it appeared to have the unimpeachable authority of both Plato and Aristotle behind it—and the Romans were great believers in authority. In addition, Polybius had hit upon the Romans’ one fatal weakness: their fascination with politics.

  They were obsessed with the subject. The city’s noble families kept competitive score of how many members had been elected as consul or tribune and spent their time speculating which son or grandson was likely to be the next. Everyone else wanted to know who had the most clout in the Senate; who had the most momentum in the next election; and which princeps (head of the Senate) or great man was in the voters’ favor and which was not.

  Roman politics was not for the faint of heart. It was the story of endless feuds and bloody partisan battles among great families reminiscent of the movie The Godfather. In the years after Polybius’s Histories appeared, from 133 to 85 BCE, seven consuls and four tribunes of the plebs were murdered in street violence.16 Yet those were the same years in which Rome completed its domination of Spain, conquered Gaul (France), and brought the rest of Asia Minor, Syria, Cyrene (Libya), and Cyprus under its sway.

  It was a strange juxtaposition. It looked even stranger to Rome’s political elite and finest minds, who, after reading Polybius, could see in Rome’s unprecedented growth to power only the seeds of corruption and destruction. The idea that Rome’s good old days—including that marvelous mixed constitution—were vanishing blinded men to the possibility that something new, better, and stronger might be emerging. Instead Rome’s ruling class became obsessed with decline and inured to an indifferent fate. “Now we are suffering the evils of too long a peace. Luxury, deadlier than any armed invader, lies like an incubus upon us still, avenging the world we brought to heel,” Juvenal wrote in Satire VI.

  The first to sense that something was wrong was Marcus Porcius Cato (234
–149 BCE), and he knew just where to point the finger of blame: “The Greeks are a most wicked and undisciplined people,” he argued, whose philosophy and literature were spreading the same corruption into Rome.

  Cato singled out Socrates as the main source of the difficulty, that “windbag who did his best to tyrannize over his country by undermining its established customs.” Cato spent his life trying to get Greek teachers and tutors expelled from the city, to keep them from doing the same to Rome.17 Yet Cato’s great-grandson would go to study in Athens and become Rome’s leading Stoic voice.

  Grit your teeth and bear it. Keep your temper. Remain indifferent to pain and accept your fate, whatever it may be. These are hallmarks of the Stoic outlook, and the younger Cato (95–46 BCE) hoped that cultivating the parallels between traditional Roman values and Greek Stoicism could restore its ruling class. He was wrong. Instead, by his time, the age of Pompey and Julius Caesar, the demoralization of Rome’s elite had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 BCE) was typical. Bright and able, he came from a Roman family with hopes of a political career. He soon found himself in over his head. In 50 BCE, the censors of the Senate swept him out of the consulship on charges of vice and accepting bribes.

  Sallust took his revenge by retiring to the country to write history—increasingly the way in which Rome’s losers managed to get their revenge on the winners. Sallust describes how he tried to make his honest way into politics. However, “there I found many things against me. Self-restraint, integrity, and virtue were disregarded; unscrupulous conduct, bribery, and profitseeking were rife.”

  Sallust had read and absorbed Polybius’s Histories. Like Polybius, he chose the final defeat of Carthage in 146 BCE as the moment when “Fortune turned unkind” against Rome, the world’s greatest power. Before that, Romans had been better and more noble. “To such men no toil came amiss; no ground was too steep or rugged, no armed foe too formidable; courage taught them to overcome all obstacles.” Their only goals in life were honor and glory; “at home they lived frugally and never betrayed a friend.”18

  However, as Rome’s empire grew, “growing love of money, and the lust for power which followed it, engendered every kind of vice.” Today, Sallust declared, Romans were surrounded by “universal robbery and pillage.” Yet even as he wrote this sentence circa 50 BCE, the city’s power and influence in the world were still growing, from Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul to his rival Pompey’s suppression of piracy across the Mediterranean and subjugation of Egypt and the Levant.

  Rome, it seemed, was never in worse shape; and never more powerful. Sallust and his literary successors ignored the contradiction. Instead, the overall pattern of writing Roman history was set, from the last days of the republic straight through the empire. The story would be presented as the story of Rome’s steady slide from virtue to vice—in Sallust’s words, “the steady degeneration of its noble character into vice and corruption”—of which the chief sign was, paradoxically, its imperial growth and steady advance over its foreign rivals.19

  On the one hand, Rome enjoyed a power without equal or limits. On the other, the glory surrounding that power would seem increasingly hollow—even a sign of imminent dissolution and moral collapse. The fact that the one seemed to contradict the other never bothered the Romans. Plato and Polybius made them immune to material success, just as they were resigned to moral failure. “Here in the city nothing is left,” wrote one of Sallust’s contemporaries, “the real Rome is gone forever.”20

  It had taken an outsider using Plato and Aristotle to get Rome into this jam. It would take another using Plato and Aristotle to try to get it out.

  He was born north of Rome in 106 BCE, in the small town of Arpinum. Marcus Tullius Cicero lacked the aristocratic connections of a Cato or Julius Caesar, or the ruthless will of a Pompey or Crassus. To this day, hardheaded historians of Rome treat him with disdain, even contempt, while the Middle Ages and Renaissance revered him, even though they barely understood him. Entirely self-made, Cicero learned to rely on his gifts as an orator and a lawyer to get ahead. They were considerable enough to land him his position as quaestor in Syracuse at age thirty-two and consul, the republic’s supreme office, at forty. In 50 BCE, the year Sallust was swept from office and noisily denounced the violence and corruption infecting Roman politics, Cicero was proconsul in the province in Cilicia. He was poised to return to Rome to take a leading part in its political debates—and in his own mind, to save the city single-handedly from political breakdown and disaster.

  As educated as any philosopher, Cicero saw that trying to use sheer force of will and reason to uphold the old standards of courage and integrity, as Stoics like Cato were trying to do, would never be enough. On the other side, engaging in a steady dirge lamenting lost Roman virtue, as Sallust and others were doing, was pointless. Polybius had used Plato to turn Aristotle’s politics, and Rome’s, inside out. Cicero subtly sought to reverse the process.

  He had grown up with Greek tutors and had traveled to Athens to study at the third or new Academy under the philosopher Carneades, which Cicero believed came closest to Socrates’s own methods. He admired Plato more than any other thinker: “the prince of philosophers,” was Cicero’s title for him. Indeed, Cicero’s De Re Publica is closely modeled on the Republic, and it follows Plato’s dialogue form. Cicero’s goal was the same as Plato’s: to offer a picture of the ideal state.21 But Cicero’s state is not a utopian dream but a real place—republican Rome. Its main character is not a philosopher but a politician, as it happens a figure from Polybius’s past, not Cicero’s: the Greek historian’s long-dead master, Scipio Aemilianus. He is a symbol of Rome as it once was—and might be again.

  Cicero endorsed Polybius’s view that Rome’s mixed constitution was the cornerstone of its success. Rome’s future, he affirmed, would depend on maintaining that proper balance between the Senate, the consulate, and the Roman people, all pulling together in their respective roles.22 But Cicero rejected Polybius’s prediction of Rome’s doom and Plato’s inevitable cycle of political degeneration. Instead, he had Aristotle come to Rome’s rescue not in just one but two powerful ways.

  First, Cicero made Aristotle’s ethics the core of his projected Roman revival, and his res publica. The Latin term means literally “the public thing,” and for Cicero the Roman republic is far more than just its constitution or system of government—what mattered most to an analyst like Plato. Instead, the republic is the place where citizens learn and practice the virtues they need in order to be happy, as a matter of civic habit. The chapters of De Re Publica where Cicero talks about the qualities needed for the ideal citizen and statesman are lost.23 However, we get some hint of them in the titles of some of his other works: On Friendship (De Amicitia); On Moral Obligations (De Officiis); and in his writings on piety and respect toward the gods, On the Laws (De Legibus), and on respect for one’s elders, On Old Age (De Senectute). And his chief moral tenet certainly echoes Aristotle’s: “Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.”

  Above all, Cicero wanted Rome’s citizens to keep an Aristotelian sense of proportion between their responsibility toward family and friends and their responsibility toward the state. No relationship should be more important to us than the one with our patria, our country. “Our parents are dear, our children are dear,” Cicero writes, “our friends and relatives; but our patria alone embraces all our deepest feeling. What good man would hesitate to meet death for its sake, if he could?”24

  At the same time, Cicero also echoed Aristotle by noting that the individual household is “the seed-bed of the State.” By Cicero’s reckoning, government must respect our personal sphere of responsibilities and connections, including our property, in order to win our respect and loyalty. Indeed, Cicero straightforwardly states that the reason men create states and cities is to protect private property—a momentous step beyond Aristotle’s own views and toward those of John Locke fifteen cen
turies later.25

  In short, there must be another balance to match the one that maintains a free and fair constitution. This is the balance between the state and the citizen, between the needs of the community and what Romans called libertas, or individual liberty. For Cicero, maintaining that balance represents the future of all free men. In this way, Polybius’s mixed constitution will have a firm moral foundation in the mutual obligations that tie us together as individuals (much as Aristotle would have pointed out), as well as those that bind us as a community (as Plato would have insisted).

  But how to do this? To understand Cicero’s solution, and Aristotle’s next major contribution to the Western political tradition, we also have to understand that politics in late republican Rome was above all a performance art. Like the audience at a cineplex, every citizen and politician, even those from the most exalted patrician families, expected it to be as dramatic and theatrical as possible. And center stage was Rome’s Forum, the hub of civic life.

  On any given day, Cicero could wander down to the Forum and squeeze through throngs of people gathered around one elevated rostrum after another. On some were candidates for office haranguing voters; on others were major debates in front of one of Rome’s many plebeian assemblies; on still others were law trials, where both budding and experienced politicians honed their oratorical skills, just as Cicero himself had done, by defending friends or clients before a jury—or prosecuting their enemies.

  Cicero had built his career arguing such cases, and liked to compare practicing law with acting in front of a theater audience.b He knew Roman crowds were always looking for the most exciting law case or political dispute. One could easily spot the oratorical superstars by the size of their corona, literally “crown,” or circle of admiring listeners.26 The same was true of politics. Eloquentia was the quality most highly prized among Roman statesmen, and every politician had to be able to sway a crowd with the kind of emotionally charged language and operatic gestures—even as he might be dodging brickbats or flying missiles or fending off an enemy’s dagger—that we usually associate today with a Verdi or Puccini aria.