Do intellectuals have a place in the world of politics? Do hardheaded political figures have any use for eggheads? Do decision and action in critical circumstances require movers and shakers rather than thinkers and deliberators? Such questions permeate (even without direct articulation) Volk's rich study of intellectual life in the late Roman Republic (63 – 43 BCE) and reverberate for decision-makers in contemporary society. The choice of period is perfectly logical: a time of turbulence, fraught with peril, when the very endurance of the republic was in question, yet also an era of abundant scholarly and cultural productivity that has left a continuing legacy. Was this remarkable confluence a happy coincidence or a source of friction and contention?Volk resolves the issue through amalgamation: The major figures on the political scene of the late republic and the leading lights of the intellectual world were largely one and the same. There is much truth to that generalization. Prominent personalities like Cicero, Caesar, Cato, and Brutus were heavily engaged in public policy as well as literary output and philosophical reflection. Such persons eschewed specialization or professionalism. Political life was as central an ingredient in their makeup as their scholarship and their literary contribution. The convergence mattered. And the enterprise was communal. As Volk observes, the dialogues of Cicero that depict intellectual exchanges among these figures, though fictional, represent genuine collective and sustained activities in the network of learned upper-class Romans who also operated at the highest levels of government.In addition to denying any tension between politics and the life of the mind, Volk also relieves the Romans of supposed anxieties about alleged Hellenic cultural ascendancy. There was no inferiority complex that led to anti-intellectualism. Romans not only could do everything that Greeks did but did it better. Late Republican polymaths like Cicero, Varro, and Nigidius Figulus did more than hold their own. And Caesar eclipsed all in the combination of political, military, and literary accomplishment.The sticking point, however, might be philosophy. Learned Romans engaged in it. But how conscientiously and how successfully? Eminent scholars have argued that Roman dabbling in Greek philosophy did not leave a mark on their public principles or policies. Volk, however, makes a strong case for the integration rather than segmentation of these spheres. Cato's Stoicism motivated his convictions and his steadfastness in the public arena, culminating in his suicide, as both moral commitment and display. Cicero's sometimes tortured grappling with alternate political successes and disappointments reflected his embrace of academic skepticism that provided reasoned bases for his shifting political positions. But did not Roman Epicureans have a problem? We can identify more of them than adherents of any other doctrine: Cassius, Piso, Memmius, Pansa, Trebatiius Testa, and others. How could they square their public ambitions and careers with the principles of Epicureanism that stressed quietism, the pleasures of the Garden, and avoidance of the hurly-burly and stresses of political life? How could the ardent Epicurean Cassius bring himself to orchestrate the assassination of Julius Caesar? Some, like Volk, have tried to resolve the contradiction by proposing that Epicureans were not all that rigid. The hedonistic calculus was manipulable. Contingent circumstances allowed for compromises and modifications when called for. Well, yes — but is this a rationalization or a dodge? The resolution remains irresolute. Epicureans do not easily fit the picture. And since Epicureanism seems the dominant creed among philosophical Romans, it makes one wonder about how solid was the integration of philosophy and politics. Cicero's great friend Atticus did indeed succeed in exercising an influential impact in the upper reaches of Roman society while staying true to Epicureanism and staying out of political engagement. But, wealthy, elegant, and accomplished as he was, Atticus did not belong to the senatorial class, and political ambitions would have their limits. Atticus could easily have made his choice on nonphilosophical grounds.After Caesar's victory over Pompey in the civil war and his assumption of the dictatorship, the republic seemed doomed — and so did “the Republic of letters.” There might still be polite epistolary interchanges, and literary debates on public matters, as with the Cato and Anti-Cato dueling treatises. But things were not the same, nor could they have been. Cicero might offer collegial advice to the dictator in speeches and letters on pardoning enemies or retaining some trappings of the republic. But his messages had to be vetted first by Caesarian agents. And when they asked for major changes in a letter, the despondent Cicero simply scrapped the missive. It was a new world. Insofar as there had been a smooth overlap between scholarship and statesmanship, the bonds were now loosened, if not severed. Caesar generously, perhaps disingenuously, praised Cicero's literary skills and style but made it clear that his accomplishments lay in the intellectual sphere, not in the political, where the dictator was dominant. Segmentation eclipsed integration.Volk's intellectual history of the late republic is learned and wide-ranging. In addition to philosophy, it touches on writers and works in chronology, historiography, oratory, political theory, grammar, language, astrology, and religion. The towering figures throughout, however, remain Cicero and Caesar. In terms of interaction and interplay on both intellectual and political fronts, they may, in the end, be more exceptional than representative. But no matter. The brilliant and gifted pair can still serve to define the era.
Erich S. Gruen (Thu,) studied this question.