Introduction

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC in Arpinum in Latium, and was killed on December 7^th 43 in a political purge. His life coincides with one of the greatest political upheavals of all time, one that is in the same league as the English, American, French, and Russian Revolutions in history: that is, the end of the Roman Republic and the creation of an Emperor.

An eclectic philosopher, Cicero was much indebted to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics for his political theory as well to Roman legal tradition and institutions. While evidently he believed himself to be fulfilling the role of Plato’s philosopher king in his official capacities, it was always to the Romans and examples of their achievements that he turned in his speeches to drive his arguments home reminding his people of what they were losing in the fall of the Republic to strong men in control of their own armies and the dangers of civil war.

Cicero was professionally a lawyer but also a notable polymath who was a reputable philosopher, a man of letters and a poet in his own right. A child prodigy, he gained his early fame through successfully defending legal cases, and his ambitious presence on the Roman stage grew as he pushed oratory to its highest levels – skills that took him to the premier office in the land – Consulship, which his background normally would have excluded him from. After Cicero, we see few statesmen of his worth in the Roman Empire: great leaders and politicians, yes, but none of the calibre of Cicero, who realised how much the Roman people had to lose in giving up their Republic.

Life

 

Cicero was born to a wealthy family and was provided a proficient education both in Athens  and in Rome. Although his lineage could be traced to the ancient Sabine Kings, Cicero was deemed a ‘new man’ in Rome, as he emerged from the gentry rather than the aristocratic class and none of his family had risen to the Senate.

In 89BC, aged 17, he embarked on military service under Pompeius Strabo, the father of Pompey. Pompey – of the same age as Cicero – was to play an important part, albeit not always predictable, in Cicero’s destiny and political career.

But in 82 Lucius Cornelius Sulla, veteran of the Social Wars (Italians fighting for tax free status), defeater of Mithridates (who had led the greatest tax revolt against the Roman Empire killing 80,000 Romans), turned his attentions to Rome, where his house had been destroyed and his family forced into exile. Sulla enacted a violent purge of Senators and the higher echelons of the Republic, reorganising the government and producing a shift in politics, away from Senatorial rule and towards a military monarchy – power being usurped by any general in command of sufficient soldiers and the ability to pay for them. Sulla’s coup disclosed the patent weakness in the Senate’s rule over the Empire – corrupt and tempting for any capable general with loyal soldiers thereafter to take control.

After successfully and courageously defending a case brought by Sulla against Roscius, a friend of Cicero’s family, Cicero quick footed it for Greece to study in Athens and to improve his voice and general health, which had not been good. Three years after Sulla’s death, and in his mid-twenties, Cicero was creating a professional reputation at the bar and in 75 was given a position in financial administration in western Sicily. In 63BC, back in Rome, Cicero took on what became his most famous case and marginally persuaded the Senate of the danger of L. Sergius Catiline, who, after squandering his own wealth and been refused the consulship, pilfered taxes and ruined his country and was in the process of raising an armed rebellion against Rome in the footsteps of Sulla.

The evidence against Catiline was accumulating, but Cicero took a great political risk in prosecuting the local strong man and he narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of his enemy’s agents. (He wore chain mail in a speech to the Senate to advertise the danger to himself). Following his successful indictment, Catiline and his followers were executed on Cicero’s orders, for Cicero was not averse to applying the full force of Roman law against those who had threatened its internal peace, or indeed his own life.

Following their execution, he received the crowd’s approbation with his famous line: “vixerunt” – they were living, which the masses duly loved him for. However, the sentence he passed had been enacted without trial, and his circumventing due legal process gave his enemies dangerous evidence with which to challenge the young upstart lawyer.

 

While Cicero was making a mark on the law profession – calling himself the saviour of the Republic to gain popular support, events were culminating around him that were to irrevocably change and destroy the Republic; behind the fractious disputes between the various strata and families of Rome, the ambitious Julius Caesar was making his rise to power, perceiving the inherent weakness in the Senate’s role and slowly but very surely attracting a wide base of support. [1] In 62 Caesar reached the office of Praetor, and in 61 attained the governorship of Spain. At this time Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar formed a secret pact to assist each other: this is known as the First Triumvirate and it acted to side-step the increasingly weak Senate and its smaller political factions. In 59, Caesar successfully stood for consulship and after his year in office left to conquer Gaul and subjugate the tribes on the left-bank of the Rhine while still keeping his hand in Roman politics.

          In 60BC, Cicero had refused to become an adviser to the triple alliance of Julius, Crassus, and Pompey. He deemed the alliance not only unconstitutional but also a threat to the Republic. It soon became apparent, fulfilling Cicero’s suspicions, [2] that Julius Caesar had no compunction employing the heavy mob to enforce his own ambitions. Cicero was forced into exile to Macedonia  and then to Ilyricum. But his continued friendship with Pompey brought him back to popular support to Rome in 57. Cicero advised Pompey to remove himself from the alliance, but failing so, he judiciously decided to become himself an adviser to the three powers. Following some ethically compromising law cases, Cicero retired from public life to concentrate on philosophy and writing.

In 51 Cicero was offered the position of Governor in the newly acquired south Asia Minor province of Cilicia, which was expecting an invasion from the Parthians which never materialised. Perhaps it was politic to remove the great orator by promoting him to an unwanted department. Nonetheless, there he capably and successfully ordered the suppression of some guerrilla fighters in the mountains, which provided him with a supplicatio – a public day of thanks-giving – in Rome.

On Cicero’s next return to Rome, Julius was making his pivotal move to dominate his rival Pompey in crossing the Rubicon. (January 10/11^th 49; the Rubicon being a small stream in the north of Italy marking the political jurisdiction of Julius as governor of Gaul).

The Triumvirate fell apart – tensions had grown with Caesar’s military successes, and Crassus had fallen in the battle of Carrhae in 53 in his own attempt to take on the Parthians. [3] Crassus’ death left only a suspicious Pompey facing the great Caesar.

According to Roman law, a governor was prohibited from taking his army over his provincial boundaries, for to do so was an act of war: hence the symbolic importance of Caesar’s manoeuvre over the Rubicon. Nonetheless, he had ensured the strength of his political base in Italy before proceeding over the river. Civil war broke out – a policy that neither he nor Pompey had wanted, but the inherent weakness of the increasingly vulnerable Senate had removed other options. Caesar pursued Pompey and his armies around the Roman world – across Spain, Greece and finally he settled, victorious in Egypt  following Pompey’s treacherous murder by the Egyptian King’s servant. In 45, now entitled imperator (commander-in-chief cum emperor designate), Caesar crushed rebellions in North Africa before returning to Rome to begin his reformation of the Empire and reintroducing a more favourable tax scheme to the cities across the Empire that gained him vital support across the Empire.

Although Cicero had allied himself with Pompey, as Caesar gained momentum, Cicero’s allegiance was forgiven by Caesar, who wanted Cicero’s reputation and skills working for him. Following Caesar’s victory, however, Cicero once again removed himself from politics and immersed himself in writing. The patrician system and the Republic were on the verge of collapse, and Julius was enacting what were to be the foundations of imperial rule – a dictatorship. Earlier, in 54-52, Cicero had warned, “that our state only survives as a verbal concept, and has lost any practical reality at all, is not just an accident. We ourselves are to blame…” [4]

On March 15^th (the Ides of March) 44 BC, Julius was assassinated. Many thought Cicero was behind the plot, which he was not, although he accepted the insinuations with some glee. Cicero quickly returned to political affairs in what must have seemed to him a more liberal, or at least hopeful atmosphere. Cicero, in his Philippic Orations (modelled on Athenian Demosthenes’ speeches against the machinations of King Philip II) now brought his oratorical artillery to fire upon Mark Antony, whom Cicero considered the most dangerous figure now stalking the circles of power. But Antony formed a Second Triumvirate with Octavian (Caesar’s adopted nephew) and Lepidus, Caesar’s magister equitum (master of the cavalry), ex-consul and governor of Spain. Lepidus was soon to be sidelined by Antony and Octavian. [5]

Although he had relied on Octavian’s support in the Senate, Cicero underestimated the intelligence and fortitude of the Octavian, and made an unfortunate comment that “the young man should be given praise, distinctions – and then be disposed of.” This prescription was passed to Octavian, who was then allied with Antony and Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate; between them, they published a list of their own most wanted. Cicero was on Antony’s list and he was killed in flight near Caieta (Gaeta) on December 7^th 43BC, facing his executioners with Stoical fortitude. [6] His head and hands were brought back to Rome on Antony’s orders to be exhibited in the Senate. Another sin had been committed against philosophy.

 

Cicero’s philosophical life was for the most part secondary to his political life, which, as a man without the usual social background required for high-level politics who rises to become a Consul, certainly means that his ambitions show in his writings. But we must see through his politicking to enjoy the gems of thought discoverable in his writings. He learned philosophy in order to become a great orator and in his later life spent much time (albeit involuntarily) realizing his own philosophical thoughts on a wide range of subjects. [7] Thus in Cicero we have a fascinating mixture of Plato’s statesman, Aristotle’s virtuous man, and a Stoical proponent of cosmopolitanism, who sought to maintain the philosophical high-ground in troublesome times.

His adherence to principle was laudatory, courageous, and honourable; and the times when he had to remain silent or bend principle to party interest were understandable. He wrote with a lucidity that has influenced generations of intellectuals down to the present day, and has remained a model for those who have faced and spoken in dangerous times. Cicero himself was pre-eminently active in attempting to reverse the slide into factionalism and dictatorship. But a concatenation of events that he could not influence, and machinations he comprehended but could not always hold at bay, finally overwhelmed his voice.

 

The Context

To gain a better perspective of the milieu in which Cicero lived, wrote, and advised, it is worth considering the nature of Roman society: this is important for his philosophy and hence of his thoughts on war. Philosophy – in the sense of pure contemplation unhampered by political activity – was not something normally held in great regard by the Romans: Roman thought had to be welded to action [8] and we may be better off describing Cicero’s works as philosophical; nonetheless, when he had time to contemplate more freely, he certainly wrote quality philosophy worthy of modern consideration.

Roman society was divided into three levels – free citizens, unfree citizens, and non-citizens. Patrician families ruled estates worked on by the plebeian class of unfree citizens and serfs. In 291 and 287 ‘democratic’ reforms gave the plebeian class more political power and access to the higher strata; nonetheless, extreme social contrasts between urban and rural and rural villas and great estates (latifundia), and between the social strata continued throughout the history of the empire.

The élite patronised families and individuals lower in status than themselves – patronage was an important element of Roman politics and permitted some democracy alongside the essentially oligarchic rule by the patrician families. But in the heyday of the Republic, an individual knew his or her position and status and his corresponding duties, rights, expectations and responsibilities.

The sense of belonging to a city-state or Greek polis had expanded under Roman rule to the more abstract concept of a supra-tribal citizenship. [9] Despite the class divisions, this enfranchisement of the population across national and cultural boundaries provided a concrete substantiation of what Alexander had dreamt of at his famous banquet – a cosmopolitan world: but it was Rome that provided the necessary condition of internal peace – the pax romana between the Empire’s various peoples, and with Rome came the first glimmerings of the rule of law, property and contract rather than the rule of the sword.

Whilst the daily running of the Empire was heavily indebted to political self-interest, ambition and pride, arguably the emerging vision of a universal code of laws guided its thinkers and later philosophers, who envisaged their own versions of what, in terms of harmony and peace, an empire or federation of nations subject to a common code of laws, respect of property and private rights, could achieve. [10] Without this rule of law, Cicero persistently cautioned, lawlessness would spread and Rome would fall. [11]

Within this context, Roman military ethic evolves and we begin to witness the development of a universal justum bellum: an internationally applicable legal theory of the justification of war. The lawful authority of the State was to be defended mercilessly: civic responsibility, military service and respect for the law were deeply ingrained in the Roman ethic, [12] which in moral terms was based on the three virtues of gravitas, pietas, and iustia: responsibility, filial devotion, and a sense of a natural order.

Unfortunately, the great Roman minds held these values to form the necessary conditions of a peaceful political society: that is, without them peace and good government would be impossible. Implicatively, they possessed an optimist’s view of human nature driven by the myths and legends of personal greatness and valour, of honour and political destiny, which, when they are apparent, are rare values indeed, whose permanence cannot be relied on to support a political edifice.

As the Roman Empire grew, all internal economical, political, and judicial resources were geared to support the might of the Roman Army and territorial expansionism, [13] leaving the Empire to effectively rule supreme in its domains until the end of the fourth century.

Rome began its rise to power around the same time Alexander was invading and conquering the east. The Italian peninsula was similar to the Greek mainland, in that it was composed of many tribes and small nations who often fought one another, leaving them weak and vulnerable to a more focused and consistent aggressor. Rome’s eventual shift into imperial expansion was motivated originally by a desire to secure its own borders, which were very vulnerable to attack not only from local tribes but also from periodic Gallic invasions from southern France (Gaul). The Latium area of Cicero’s ancestors was one of the first neighbouring territories that Rome subdued in its rise to power in 338BC.

But as Rome expanded, warfare became a way of ‘protecting Rome’s interests’ and then a policy of aggrandisement for its own sake – something that Cicero was to rail against, as he foresaw the disasters that would loom if politics were to be driven by military men and their interests.

Unsurprisingly, in this climate, bright men were attracted to politics, law, and the military, where they could earn their fortunes, rather than to philosophical, artistic, or scientific pursuits, which tended to be taught by and pursued by Greeks. But when dark conspirational clouds loomed over the Republic from the 80s onwards, philosophical explanations, justifications, and prescriptions were certainly needed: [14] and Cicero rose to the challenge to defend the Republic with oratorical and literary style that still influences Western politics.

Cicero lived in hellacious times. Sulla’s coup had left thousands murdered and exiled and had also left a brutal but tempting precedent for future potential dictators controlling their own private armies; the members and hence the institutions of the Republic had been attacked and terrorised by its own people. Sulla’s coup was not an event that could easily be forgotten. Cicero trod carefully in the ensuing political upheavals that threatened once more to cleave the Roman establishment. Reflected in his legal writings are in his vain but honourable attempts to stem the demise into the politics of personality, faction and ultimately violence – a drift that Plato and Aristotle had warned about in their works.

In his brave attempt to halt the slide into barbarity, Cicero became Rome’s greatest political philosopher as well as one the world’s greatest ever orators. Moreover, what we also find in Cicero’s writings on war is an exposition of the general Roman theory of war, which was heavily legalistic and Rome-centred, but which nonetheless influenced later doctrinal developments in the Christian church through the writings of Saints Augustine and Aquinas, and which culminate in the modern just war theory and the international conventions of the Hague and Geneva, etc., and especially in the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

 

Cicero’s general philosophy

           

Cicero stood on the uncertain brink of the emergence of new a political order, one he was inherently suspicious of, but under what became Octavian Augustus’s benign despotism seemed the best choice in the circumstances.

Cicero’s is the last voice and arguably one of the best voices to emerge in Rome’s history to apply reason and impartiality to the nature and application of government, who sought to avoid the temptations of epicurean philosophy and the short-term gains of political manoeuvring. Nonetheless, whilst aiming at the ideal of government neutrality, he was not averse himself to bending principles according to the context or the individual and their particular circumstances, in order that the more important principle of government continuity be maintained.

His political philosophy is one of cosmopolitanism tinged with memorable pragmatic elements that critics often dismiss him as being the apologist of Rome and not a deep thinker. That certainly has to be rejected – a man has to accept the cultural milieu into which he is born: he can alter specific policies and some cultural tendencies but he cannot overthrow the inherited rules, traditions, and expectations that have formed over generations.

As a philosopher, Cicero was greatly influenced by the contemporary schools taught in Greece and Rome. He studied under Phaedrus the Epicurean(140-70), Diodotus the Stoic (d.60BC), and under Philo of the Athenian Academy (160-80). Cicero evolved to become an eclectic thinker: with regards to knowledge, he professed the scepticism of the Platonic Academy, but ethically, fearing the implications of moral relativism, he was most influenced by an admixture of Stoicism and Peripatetic thinking, which leaned to an objectivist theory on morality: some acts are right and some acts are wrong. In his publications, from which he sought to produce a philosophical encyclopaedia for Rome, he drew on the Stoics, the Academicians, the Epicureans, and the Peripatetics; for style he used Aristotle and Plato’s student Heracleides Ponticus (who first suggested the rotation of the earth around the sun) instead of Plato himself. Bertrand Russell  argued that as we move away from the solidity of the city states of Athens  into the more fluid world of Empires, human thinking shifted from politics to other-worldliness, from how to manage this world to how to manage being a pawn or being overwhelmed by distant events. [15] That is certainly true of the three main post-Athenian philosophies to arise – Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, yet it cannot be held of the Cicero’s take on the philosophy of the Roman Empire with its deeply embedded core values of responsibility, order and patriotism, wedded as they were to the objective success or failure of its legions and the maintenance of the glory of Rome.

          The Stoics believed that the gods existed and that they judged people on their conduct. The gods had given man reason, which they shared with the gods, along with animal appetite, which they shared with the rest of nature. The Stoics argued that pleasure was not to be shunned as such, but used correctly in conjunction with the natural law; against the epicureans, Cicero argued that to pursue pleasure reduced man’s status to that of the beasts. In a comment that would be appropriately repeated in modern ethics readers, Cicero challenged the utilitarian conception of the epicureans: “if someone says that pain is the greatest evil, what place does courage, which is the disdaining of pain and toil, have with him?” That is, there can be no virtue if we seek pleasure as if we were mere beasts.

The Stoics distinguished between ius gentium and ius naturalae, thereby presenting the useful distinction between the laws man makes and the laws he is universally subject to. The Stoics drew on the common regularities in the law between people and through the Roman Empire, hence the theoretical possibility of an international law was formed: a law of the peoples of the world, to which both Romans and barbarians are subject. Natural law obliges us to take part in politics and to support one’s community for without it a man is nothing; it entails the important theory that man must adjust his actions to natural laws, if he is to succeed in his actions; and it also demands that he use his mind to understand those laws – i.e., to deploy reason and not to take arms.

War is certainly unnatural in that regard: it destroys the peaceful conflict of debate and renders man beastlike (especially in hand-to-hand combat [16] ), and, to quoet Cicero, if a man “thinks that acting violently against other men involves doing nothing contrary to nature – then how can you argue with him? For he takes all the ‘human’ out of being a human.” [17]

To live life well for the Roman meant to live according to virtues, and this is something stoicism both drew on and taught. The three paramount virtues for the Romans were gravitas (responsibility), pietas (filial devotion), and iustia (the sense of a natural order), and these help us to understand the Roman and Cicero’s philosophy of war. Cicero used all three to expose and condemn the rising corruption in the Roman military and in its politics, and the philosophy of war that emerges from his writings demands that agents be responsible for their actions and that they, and hence the Republic, seek honour. He accordingly appealed to the overarching natural order of things; however, whilst his thinking is tinted with Stoical cosmopolitanism, all Ciceronian values tend to end in the justification, defence and even, if necessary, in his appeal to be heard by his contemporaries, expansion of the Roman Empire.

It is, of course, rather convenient that Cicero’s community had risen to hegemony, but he is not always the apologist for Rome that critics hold him to be. Evidence comes straight from his pen: “as long as the empire...was maintained through acts of kind service and not through injustices, wars were waged on either behalf of allies or about imperial rule, wars were ended with mercy or through necessity...we were a protectorate rather than an empire.” [18] Self-serving political expansion indeed, but Cicero cannot be held to be ignorant of ruling unjustly – he had read his Aristotle’s Politics and knew personally from his prosecution of Catiline the dangers of ruling arbitrarily.

Cicero’s Philosophy of War

       In Cicero’s philosophy of war we find the generally accepted Roman – indeed Mediterranean – traditions concerning war, for the rules of war do not require philosophers to conceive them: they emerge from the very nature of inter-social interaction, even in conflict.

For the most part, Cicero describes the Roman laws of war, but his moral theory also produced some interesting thoughts on how wars ought to be fought and which pass on through to the Western just war tradition, for once explicated, rules may then be discussed and merged into a more consistent doctrine, or one that fits better into an overarching doctrine the government adheres to.

The Roman philosophy of war was highly legalistic, drawing for example, on the festial laws – the laws of the priesthood that determined the declaration and ending of warfare. The laws thus transcend political philosophy as well as ethics, drawing on the peculiar agreement the Romans believed they had with the gods that gave them their manifest destiny to rule their neighbours. The laws incorporated notions of the rights of the state to protect itself against rebellion, as well as considerations of the treatment of Roman and non-Roman civilians, but Cicero extends the Stoical emphasis on the commonalties between people to demand that the Roman military take care of its subject peoples and not rile them into rebellion or into a hatred of Roman treachery. Mithridates’ tax revolt was still recent history.

Cicero’s descriptions of the rules of war must also be read as prescriptive reminders of how things have been and how, therefore, they should be: we must recall that he was speaking to an audience whose families had gained greatly from military victories – in effect, his philosophical pitch, that Rome must be honourable to itself, its neighbours and enemies, comes from the putatively held higher morality of Rome’s ancestors – their honour shone through as a moral light to be replicated (or should shine through). It’s not a stretch to argue that by so pitching many of his speeches, Cicero was warning his audiences of the pitfalls of myopic pride and greed, of when wars were justified on the flimsiest of criteria to satisfy short-term political considerations. By emphasising the importance of honourable dealings, Cicero is saying – don’t aggress against people who’ve done you no wrong: it’s not right; while at the same time he gives a nod to imperial expansion to catch their ears: after all, a down and out pacifist would not get far in the middle of the Roman Empire – on the Middle Eastern fringes, perhaps.

Cicero’s justum bellum

In Cicero’s writings, we find an adumbration of a legalistic just war theory, one that assists to codify the main principles governing the conduct of war that had evolved between peoples.

Firstly, for the principle of the jus ad bellum, war may justly be declared and waged against those who attack Rome or its provinces or citizens, [19] especially those who dare to attempt to enslave Roman civilians.  “What juster cause is there for waging war than the wish to repel slavery…In truth, other causes are just, but this is a necessary one.” [20]

War should be declared by a public official; this becomes a common doctrine of the just war theory. [21] Public and just declarations become necessary legal conditions for the jus ad bellum codes as they are developed in the ensuing centuries.

          Now, Living in a violent era with a tumultuous past, war was not something the Roman could afford to ignore or underplay, as Cicero advises: “Nor have I any dislike to peace; only I do dread war disguised under the name of peace. Wherefore, if we wish to enjoy peace we must first wage war. If we shrink from war, peace we shall never have.” [22] War throws society into confusion and its cause is found in the acquisitive desire for plunder and its dispersal, [23] yet war is always something that is to be chosen over enslavement. In an argument that finds an echo in John Stuart Mill’s proposal that “some things are uglier than war” almost two millennia later he argues: “even if I allow that the events of war are uncertain, and that the chances of Mars are common to both sides, still it is worthwhile to fight for freedom at the peril of one’s life. For life does not consist wholly in breathing; there is literally no life at all for one who is a slave.” [24]

Accordingly, Cicero appeals to the might of Rome to enforce the peace, a theory that is highly influential especially in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The might of Rome differed from the power of the Hellenic city-states, who grew up recognising each other’s distinct culture and who sought to iron out differences through the international Amphicytonic Council in which the poleis were deemed equal. Hellenic political pluralism was beset though by parochialism and jealousies, whereas Rome triumphed militarily against her neighbours, the Etrusci, Sabini, Apuli, etc., and thereby arose a unified policy of drawing competing groups into the Roman sphere. And in so doing, as Cicero was only too aware, the morality of Rome stretched outward and beyond the confines of the Seven Hills towards a universally embracing ethics.

Throughout his speeches and hence on his thoughts on war, we find Cicero fluctuating between the particularist ethic of Roman rule and the Stoical ethic of universalism, bringing unrelenting universalism to particular cases, often the admixture depending on the context and hence ultimate pragmatism that the practising philosopher sought to work in. In illegally persecuting and executing one man, he retorts: “It was not just Gavius, one single ordinary man, whom you consigned to that agonizing death by crucifixion. It was the principle of freedom and citizenship, shared by us all.” [25] And: “For so magnificent is our empire, so greatly is the name of Rome respected among all the nations of the world, that it is not felt permissible for any man whatsoever to treat our citizens with such savagery.” [26]

In Cicero’s rhetoric to his Roman audience, it was also quite justifiable for the Roman state to control others, weaker than itself, for such is the law of nature, and the proof of this ethic is in Rome’s contemporary dominion over the rest of the world. [27] Indeed, a weaker state should be thankful for the protection the stronger may provide; this may seem a curiously self-justifying doctrine in our present post-imperial order, but we too, as readers, must not just attempt to recreate Cicero’s vision of the world but also remove ourselves from our own, to consider impartially, as best as we can, the merits of all political theories and not merely discard them for their antiquity; after all, Aristotle’s and Cicero’s beliefs that some ought to rule others has not been lost like how precious artefacts can be lost: ideas linger because they are part of the vocabulary and hence culture of men: although not presently explicitly fashionable in their raw form, the benign imperialism or guardianship of the UN is not so far removed from Cicero’s vision.

The attraction of superior moral authority backed by political might to impose the peace has not left Western philosophy and again Cicero provides the important impetus in that regard.

Nonetheless, defence of Roman interests is thus the primary condition for a Ciceronian just war, [28] but it is not the only justification for war. Going to the assistance of allies becomes a common excuse for Rome to wage war, [29] but also, remaining consistent to his general utilitarian ethic that he advances for the security of the state faced with civil discord, Cicero admits the deployment of deterrence into his thoughts on just war, and deterrence permits the possibility of pre-emptive strikes. What ought to be the guiding principle in Cicero’s pragmatic consequentialism is the public interest however, which acts to tempers the nature of any consequentialist argument by making it less universal and hence contrary to a general cosmopolitan stoical ethic. [30]

Once properly declared, war should be swift – if peace is to be the goal of war, then a swift victory is of course a vital goal. [31] There is no middle between war and peace, [32] claims Cicero. There are two types of conflict: debate and war – the former is proper to man, the latter proper to the beasts, and “one should only resort to the latter if one may not employ the former.” [33] Rome we can see from its history hardly had a moment’s peace up till Cicero’s time, the doors of the Temple of Janus being shut only in 275, nonetheless, the securing of peace not only justifies the waging of war but also the abandonment of justice, if necessary. In effect the end of peace justifies any means to be let loose, and military expediency should surpass morality. [34] Against vicious enemies, cities may be destroyed – Cicero here may be rationalising or referring to the momentous Roman victory over the Carthaginians and the ensuing razing to the ground of that ancient city. Presumably, if the enemies could be brought within the realm of the Empire, their cities, as their cultures and religions, should be left under the benign power of Rome.

A more brutal enemy justifies a more punishing response, and this, he argues, is as much to deter them from waging further war as punish them for their aggression; “because when our minds have been inflamed against any people by reason of their cruelty, there always appears to be some war still lingering in their abodes and habitations.” [35]

Initiating aggressive war against barbarians is quite acceptable. Barbarous practices and uncivil attitudes do not in themselves form sufficient just causes for war, for Cicero invokes such issues with the right to expand the empire’s borders, seen, in some of his speeches as a good thing in itself. [36] Thus one of the rhetorical leverages to his general philosophical outlook was the value of the Roman Empire to the Senate and people, which weighs in heavily against other nations’ interests.

          In terms of explicit Ciceronian principles of jus in bello, the codes of conduct of warfare, Cicero repeats the traditional ancient customs, but in doing so gives explicit voice to the codes, something Aristotle and Plato did not. What ought to be defended in war are the temples of the immortal gods, the walls of the city, the homes of the Romans, the laws, courts, justice, wives, children and land. [37] He also points to the justifying of war on behalf of Roman merchants and seafarers attacked abroad. [38] Temples are to be sanctuaries, he implies in various statements in criticising those who do attack them, [39] except that if they are plundered, their treasures are to be displayed publicly. [40] The military ought not to set traps, use dishonest means, exploit ignorance, or deploy assassins or poisoners – terms that become familiar again in the writings of the jurist scholars on war of the 18^th Century.

But the policy of punishing an enemy is to be constantly weighed against causing further discontent, for in his approbation of Scipio (Africanus), Cicero notes how he attempted to restore property to the Sicilians. [41]

The rights of veterans ought to be protected. [42] In referring to rights, Cicero is also acting pragmatically – he did not wish to alienate a large corps of potential rebels. In the recent history following the Sulla-s coup, the allied veterans of Italy were given land grants to appease what may have become a troublesome body of discontent. However, when soldiers were on active duty, they lost individuality and were to be punished by lot rather than by miscreant: “our ancestors established a rule, that if in military affairs a crime had been committed by a number of soldiers, a few should be punished by lot, that so fear might have its influence on all, while the punishment reached only a few.” [43]

Generally speaking, the military ought not to use any dishonourable means (except when dealing with brigands and pirates, who deserve them), and such justice of war can be universally acceptable, [44] Cicero reasons, which theoretically permits the universalisation of just war codes and the acceptance of impartial justifications of war on the part of enemies. However, partiality towards Rome is not endangered; for Cicero, Rome symbolises the pinnacle of civilisation that is not only to be defended but also expanded; nonetheless, the theoretical expansion of the law beyond the borders of the state was a crucial development of the Roman Empire; it echoes later in the works of the Renaissance jurists such as Vitoria, who dealt with the application of European laws and morality to the tribes discovered in the New World. [45]

Cicero on Civil War

If traditional warfare between peoples necessitates or desiderates the employment of moral rules, civil war on the other hand eliminates the need for justice to secure the Empire’s unity. Cicero’s emphasis on the evil of civil war is derived from his conception of the Republic and the important role it possesses in securing the peace – attack the state and one attacks peace itself.

Why this is so is because of the Roman definition of the state. The state is not just an institution, it is an institution ruled correctly according to the natural law which requires a balance to be sought between its members. It is a public thing: a res publica. A state ruled by a despot is not a state properly speaking, for that can only apply to an institution that is res publica, i.e., owned by all, and a despotic state is controlled by one man or faction and hence cannot be a state by definition: hence the danger Cicero witnessed with Sulla’s coup and the troublesome offspring of that dangerous rebellion. But on the other hand, rebellion against the despotic state would be absolutely justifiable, and it is said Cicero, who saw the murder of Caesar, was privately delighted in the assassination as seeing it as a great opportunity to reinstate the Republic.

The evil of civil war is unsurprisingly a recurring Ciceronian theme, which we know from the preceding history constantly threatened the Republic and eventually overthrew it: and he eventually became one of its victims. His attacks on those who would, or do, wage civil war were emphatically vitriolic. The Roman political structure was crumbling around him, whilst slave and subject-peoples’ revolts were not infrequent, [46] and the important legacy of customs and traditions were sinking into oblivion, fading like an old handsome painting. [47]

The state, Cicero continues in forging the Stoical, organic conception that persists in western political thinking and was revived by Edmund Burke, is larger than any of the individuals that form its parts. [48] It should therefore be so firmly established that it will live forever; [49] it is not natural for states to die, and hence it is not natural for some to try and take over the reins of state for their own ends: a war against the Republic itself therefore was the worst evil: any policy that acted to demean, dishonour, weaken, or financially ruin the republic ought to be avoided, but the tumult of civil disorder in war would be too much for Rome to bear.

Such theoretical warnings can not have gone amiss, given the recent coup d’état and reign of terror of Lucius Sulla (82-81) that had ended in so much misery and the more recent dictatorship of the Triumvirate and then of Caesar.

Cicero recognised that the Roman Empire required a constant unity and hence its greatest threat was from internal discord. Rome had grown up and bonded surrounding peoples into a “monolithic entity by physical, organizational, and psychological controls.” [50] That which threatened its sense of cohesion and unity was therefore something to be dreaded and defended against.

Defined as a ‘tumult’, Cicero argues that a civil war involves the entire nation – it is more extensive than a war in which not all need fight or worry for their lives. [51] Following Aristotle and of course his own experiences, Cicero notes that civil war arises from political factionalism, whose results in the case of Sulla’s coup are detestable: [52] Sulla became Rome’s and Cicero’s bogey man. Echoing Aristotle’s condemnation of the anchorite, Cicero proclaims that a man who wages war against the core values of Roman society “ought to be erased from the catalogue of men, and exterminated from all human society.” [53] A man desiring civil war is not to be called a citizen, [54] and to wage civil war to war “with luxury, with madness, with wickedness.” [55] Accordingly, against such threats – against the survival of the state itself – Cicero argues for total war: “such a war as has never been.” [56] Total war is war in which no distinction is made between non-combatants and combatants, effectively in which the rules of just war and just warfare are abandoned to secure the goal, and Cicero claims this is justifiable only against pirates, brigands, and traitors.

Hence Cicero inveighed heavily against the rebellion of Mark Anthony that threatened the unity of the Empire. Such is his condemnation of civil war that he argues for the suspension of all justice to re-establish the peace: “a state of civil war ought to be proclaimed; and…a suspension of the ordinary forms of justice should be declared, and that the garb of war should be assumed by citizens.” [57] But in calling Mark Anthony a public enemy, Cicero alters the legal position of Anthony from that of a citizen to that of a brigand upon whom total war is to be waged and therefore justified; [58] in doing so, he was drawing strong parallels with Catiline, whom he had earlier and successfully prosecuted for treachery.

Simiarly, In Against Verres, Cicero prosecutes a corrupt governor of Sicily (at he time Rome’s most productive and strategically important province). Cicero applies a particularistic political theory to the world alongside his usual hints of Stoical cosmopolitanism. That is apparent in his condemnation of the pirates who brazenly sailed into Syracuse harbour (Sicily) and sojourned on the island, whilst its corrupt governor, Verres, remained steadfastly passive.

“The pirate”, he wrote, “was a ferocious, deadly enemy of the people of Rome. Indeed, I would go so far as to call him the common enemy of all countries and nations.” [59] While faith and promises may be kept with the enemy, no such scruples are necessary with pirates, for “he is the common foe of all. [60] ” Such thinking is the precursor, indeed the root, of our modern view of crimes against humanity; yet the Roman empire was not yet ready to unshackle the political dualism, the hierarchy between free and enslaved, that the Greeks had inherited and Aristotle accepted and justified as ‘natural’ and which passed into Christian Europe through a cultural acceptance rather than an explicit justification.

As part of his prosecution, Cicero admonished Verres for his unlawful and immoral prosecution and execution of Roman civilians, whilst at the same time allowing rebellious slaves and pirates to go free; the attack on individual Romans, Cicero deplores as an attack against every Roman citizen. [61] The appeal to the corporate body of the Republic is a vital element of Cicero’s political philosophy: the Republic, like Plato’s and Aristotle’s polis, preceded the life of the individual, and the individual was nothing without his Republic: [62] hence its moral and political import.

I’d like to finish on a Ciceronian flourish on the worst kind of government, particularly apt in the modern world when over a half of our production is usurped in the name of public services:

The worst form of government, for Cicero, is a so-called people’s or democratic government, which gives an excuse for:

 

the sort of mass government to which you have referred is just as tyrannical as if a single person were the ruler, and indeed an even nastier despot, because there is nothing more disgusting than the sort of monstrosity which fictitiously assumes the name and guise of ‘the people’. [63]

 

When the people take over the state in the name of liberty, chaos ensues. The people, he noted, are fickle – you can’t keep entertaining them and they forget the pleasures they’ve enjoyed. [64] The implication is that wars may be waged for their titillation, but that the diverted resources and manpower would be better used elsewhere – Cicero favoured infrastructure projects, for example. But to gain the applause of the masses by promising them thrills and glory, tyrants would destroy the Republic and all that it has generated. Tyrants – who emerge from such chaos by promising the people an easy life are like pirates in Cicero’s thinking: beyond the human pale. There is no fellowship between citizens and tyrants, he argues, and “indeed the whole pestilential and irreverent class ought to be expelled from the community of mankind.” [65]

Words that are still full of paramount understanding today.

 

Conclusively, Cicero’s philosophy of war was driven by the unfolding of momentous events, but his thoughts are not archaic remnants of a dead civilisation. For Rome’s fall in the fifth century AD did not remove its influence on Western thinking – philosophically, legally, and militarily. Caesars have come and gone, who would have recreated the glory that was once Rome – from Charlemagne to Mussolini; and the driving legality of Roman just war theory found a rich channel to continue – via Saints Augustine and Aquinas, to the scholars and jurists of the second millennium, through to the twentieth century’s codification of the rules of war and the last decade’s reinvigorated emphasis on the crimes against humanity committed by modern brigands.

We remain in the West, and especially in the USA, in much of our thinking on war, Romans – and hence Ciceronians.

©Dr Alexander Moseley

FOOTNOTES