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§6. Between Aristotle’s Cave and Plato’s: Phaedo and Timaeus in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum

William Henry Furness Altman

University of Marburg; July 14, 2014 The famous passage in De Natura Deorum where Cicero explains why he makes

it difficult to divine his own views is cited in a valuable article by William Stull about the

important place of Plato’s Phaedo in the first of the Tusculan Disputations:1 A.’s willing-

ness to follow the authority of Plato and M.2 not only mirrors his initial response to read-

ing Phaedo,3 but also violates the precept of De Natura Deorum 1.10 about the proper

interplay of ratio and auctoritas in philosophical discourse.4 Most importantly, according

to Stull, it allows Cicero to construct “a reenactment”5 of Plato’s dialogue:

So where A. had been ready to violate the spirit of Socrates’ exhortation by preferring Plato to truth, M. ultimately adopts the sort of stance that Socrates requested: instead of accepting what Plato taught simply because Plato taught it, he undertakes to determine, as he encounters Plato’s exer-cise in self-persuasion, whether the arguments seem true or not. Cicero’s treatment of immortality thus continues to unfold in a way that parallels the development of Phaedo precisely.6

Nor is it merely a question of parallel development since Stull’s Cicero also goes beyond

Plato:

In so doing he effectively assimilates his predecessor, adapting a Platonic pattern to provide the justification for moving beyond Plato’s text. Mean-while, the reader of the Tusculan Disputations is implicated as well, made to wonder what sort of argument, or indeed whether any argument at all, would be adequate in light of the fact that Plato’s has unexpectedly proven insufficient.7

And it is, of course, a similar kind of wonder that leads to the famous passage in De

Natura Deorum, where Cicero rejects as misplaced any given reader’s curiosity about his

own views, and therefore justifies his decision to conceal them, thereby forcing the stu-

dent to rely on ratio rather than auctoritas:

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Qui autem requirunt, quid quaque de re ipsi sentiamus, curiosius id faciunt, quam necesse est; non enim tam auctoritatis in disputando quam rationis momenta quaerenda sunt. Quin etiam obest plerumque iis, qui discere volunt, auctoritas eorum, qui se docere profitentur; desinunt enim suum iudicium adhibere, id habent ratum, quod ab eo, quem probant, iu-dicatum vident.8

In the three-book dialogue De Natura Deorum, Cicero not only puts this precept into

practice, but also does so in a manner that—thanks to the role of vision in Timaeus and

the geography of Phaedo—takes an important step beyond Plato.

While Plato was capable of writing a dialogue that contained—and was deliber-

ately written to contain—but very little truth,9 the great dialogues of conflict like Gorgias

were not constructed on the principle that both parties to the debate are equally in error.

In De Oratore, Cicero had already made an advance on Plato by allowing Antonius—his

version of Callicles—to speak without interruption for most of that great dialogue’s se-

cond book,10 and indeed to set the terms for the discourse of Crassus, Cicero’s Socrates,

in the third. But, despite appearances, there is no straightforward good guy/bad guy dia-

lectic in De Natura Deorum. There does, however, appear to be, and that appearance de-

pends on another famous passage in the dialogue, one that seems to contradict what Cice-

ro had said in the first book about auctoritas:

Haec cum essent dicta, ita discessimus, ut Velleio Cottae disputatio verior, mihi Balbi ad veritatis similitudinem videretur esse propensior.11

In the dialogue’s last sentence, the reader is offered what has been called “Cicero’s ver-

dict,”12 and this is extraordinary: does it not force the reader to be curious about the basis

of Cicero’s preference, i.e., the very thing he suggested his ideal reader should not be too

curious about? In a recent article on the dialogue, David Fott has usefully situated his

own attempt to make sense of this “verdict” in the context of other “secondary sources,”13

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and he breaks with most of his predecessors because he wastes no time trying to find

what Cicero found praiseworthy in Balbus’s discourse in book 2, concentrating instead

on what he most likely found objectionable in Cotta’s reply to Balbus in book 3.14 I will

offer a different approach.

The last sentence of De Natura Deorum looks backward to what has just been

said: haec cum essent dicta. Consider, then, what Velleius, the Epicurean spokesman, has

just said:

“Quippe”, inquit Velleius, “qui etiam somnia putet ad nos mitti ab Iove, quae ipsa tamen tam levia non sunt, quam est Stoicorum de natura de-orum oratio.”15

To begin with, this sentence points beyond De Natura Deorum to the next part of Cice-

ro’s philosophical encyclopedia, the two-book De Divinatione, where the subject of

dreams becomes a principal theme. But it also looks back to the dialogue that is now end-

ing: indeed it is the third time that Velleius has referred to the views of the Stoics as

dreams.16 It also unmistakably includes that dialogue’s title.17 In addition to Balbus’s own

account of de natura deorum, two other works of that name—one by Chrysippus, the

other by Posidonius—are also mentioned in the dialogue.18 This suggests that the dia-

logue’s real subject is not so much de natura deorum in general—a subject wrapped in

obscurity, as Cicero says at the beginning,19 and as Cotta affirms at the end20—as it is the

Stoicorum de natura deorum oratio, and, more specifically, the oratio of Balbus that fills

the dialogue’s central book, and which is, moreover, about to be valorized, at least appar-

ently, by “Cicero’s verdict.” Of course Cicero’s is not truly a “verdict” because he does

not assert that Balbus’s account is either true, or even truer than Cotta’s: it is propen-

sior—more “inclined or tending” (OLD)—ad veritatis similitudinem, and, if anything,

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Fott understates the case when he aptly observes that this description “leaves the Stoic

two removes from the truth.”21 The character of Cicero’s non-veridical verdict inevitably

provokes curiosity, and was doubtless intended to do so: the reader is forced to return to

Balbus’s de natura deorum oratio if only to discover what to make of the dialogue’s en-

igmatic conclusion.

Critical attention to Balbus’s speech suggests that it is organized around a deliber-

ate and pervasive self-contradiction:

Nihil autem nec maius nec melius mundo; necesse est ergo eum deorum consilio et providentia administrari.22

By making the world the passive recipient of the guidance of the gods, it is necessarily

subject to their guidance. But if the world is guided (administrari) by the consilium and

providentia deorum,23 how can we say that there is nothing better or greater than it?24 The

easiest way out of this dilemma is to assert the identity of deus and mundus, as Balbus

does repeatedly.25 But if that is his position, he is certainly not asserting it in this passage,

and the use of the verb administrari—with the gods as agents—has likewise occurred

repeatedly.26 The device Cicero uses to make the reader aware of the fundamental incon-

sistency of Balbus’s position is the formula nihil est melius, repeated here. Although he

has already asserted that: “nothing is better than the world,”27 he had previously used the

same formula, first about ratio and sapientia,28 and then about virtus.29 More importantly,

he has used a similar formula (nihil est praestantius) about god twice before this pas-

sage.30 And as if to preclude any attempt to parse melius as properly belonging to the

world, and praestantius to the gods whose counsel and providence guide it, the first oc-

currence of the formula—by Cotta in book 1—combines the two: Quid enim melius aut

quid praestantius bonitate et beneficentia?31 Not only does Cotta’s question illustrate the

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synonymy of melius and praestantius in the soon to become pervasive nihil est formula—

and thus the inconsistency that will arise later, when Balbus uses the one of god, the other

of the world—it also states the truth: nothing could possibly be better (melius) than boni-

tas, which—in accordance with Platonism—is paradigmatically good.

If Cotta’s question in book 1 is useful for bringing to light, in advance, the incon-

sistency that will come to haunt Balbus’s speech in book 2, he hammers home the point

in book 3:

cum ostendere velles, quales di essent, ostenderes nullos esse. A consuetu-dine oculorum animum abducere difficillimum dicebas, sed, cum deo nihil praestantius esset, non dubitabas, quin mundus esset deus, quo nihil in re-rum natura melius esset: modo possemus eum animantem cogitare vel po-tius ut cetera oculis, sic animo hoc cernere.32

First of all, Cotta is making the same charge against the Stoic that he made against the

Epicurean: a careful analysis of their affirmations reveals that both actually deny the ex-

istence of the gods.33 And since Cotta’s own speech would seem to be the most overtly

atheistic of the three,34 Cicero has created a dialogue in which—if Cotta is right about

Velleius and Balbus, and if gods exist—none of the interlocutors has managed to say

anything true about de natura deorum.35 Cotta also points to what I will show below is

Cicero’s central concern in the dialogue: the properly Platonic role of the soul and the

eyes when discussing the gods. But the crucial point for now is that Cotta is drawing at-

tention in book 3 to what a careful reader has already noticed in book 2: Balbus’s incon-

sistent claims that (1) nothing is better than the world, and (2) nothing is more pre-

eminent than the god by whom it is guided. In fact, it is this inconsistency that justifies

both Cotta’s charge of atheism, and his suggestion that it is Balbus who has not succeed-

ed in that most difficult task of detaching the soul from the habit of the eyes. The only

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consistent resolution to the problems that Cotta here brings to light is that god is nothing

more than the world we see. To put it another way: if the only way to make Balbus’s ora-

tio consistent is to unmask it as sight-based atheism, then a theism that does not depend

on sight is the unspoken alternative to Balbus’s speech once we recognize that speech for

what it is, i.e. deliberately inconsistent. All three books of De Natura Deorum operate in

tandem to bring about this recognition.

And that of course includes the dialogue’s last sentence. Despite the accuracy of

Cotta’s analysis, Balbus does not consider himself an atheist, and when Velleius—whose

master’s atheism, Cotta has suggested through Posidonius, is both deliberate and politi-

cal36—endorses Cotta’s account as the truer, it is only the Stoicorum oratio that discours-

es, however inadequately, about the nature of the gods as if there were gods. It is there-

fore as an account of the gods that Balbus’s discourse falls short of the truth, and this is

why Cicero’s enigmatic “verdict” discovers in Balbus’s speech a greater inclination to the

similitude of truth. Just as truth itself is truer than that which is merely truth-like, so too

does the existence of that which inclines more to the similitude of truth require that there

should be truth itself.37 Due to its internal contradictions, Balbus’s speech manifestly

does not and cannot contain the truth, and the fact that Cicero has drawn attention to

those contradictions—before, during, and afterwards—should draw us away from look-

ing for what is true in the speech. Instead, we would be better advised to consider that

which necessarily makes it merely a similitude of the truth, and the best way to begin

thinking about that, is to consider the problem at the heart of Balbus’s speech: the rela-

tionship between god and the world. Balbus cannot elucidate the nature of the gods with-

out discoursing on the visible world, and the most eloquent passages in his speech neces-

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sarily arise from his attempt to explain the nature of the gods by describing the beauty

and order of the visible world.38 In order to make his speech consistent, god cannot be the

extra-worldly source of the world’s beauty and order, i.e., that by which it is wisely ad-

ministered, but must become the world itself, than which—as Balbus repeatedly insists—

nihil est melius. What becomes of the gods when the visible world itself becomes god?

Are we still talking about god when we speak falsely de natura deorum? If the gods truly

exist, surely they do not simply cease to exist because we speak falsely about them. The

correlative problem is that the equation of god with the visible world makes the visible

world something more than it is. It is therefore better to ask what becomes of the world

when it is falsely equated with a god that truly exists, and in relation to which it is truly

neither melius nor praestantius. Especially when we recognize that he has repeatedly re-

vealed this false equation to be inconsistent, Cicero’s intention becomes intelligible: if

only God, and not the visible world, is that than which there is nihil melius, then Balbus’s

eloquent account of a divinized world is necessarily exactly what Cicero claims that it is:

a similitudo veritatis, a “graven image,” that, to use Martin Luther’s words, is necessarily

both Bildnis and Gleichnis.

[Du sollst dir kein Bildnis noch irgend ein Gleichnis machen, weder des, das oben im

Himmel, noch des, das unten auf Erden, oder des, das im Wasser unter der Erde ist. Note

on Hermann Cohen, Leo Strauss, and Karl Löwith].

Another way to think about what Cicero means by the words similitudo veritatis

is to consider the way Balbus integrates a crucial passage from Aristotle into his speech.

If seeing the divinized world as a mere similitude of the truth requires the reader to grant

the actual existence of unseen gods, all that is now required is to admit that Cicero be-

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lieved that Plato’s Allegory of the Cave expressed the truth, i.e., the proposition upon

which all my work on Cicero depends, and for which my primary pieces of evidence are

Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and the man himself. Certainly there can be no doubt that the

passage that Balbus quotes with warm approval from Aristotle’s Περὶ φιλοσοφίας is a

similitudo of the Platonic original. And Aristotle’s version of the Cave also bears directly

on the underlying problem in Stoic theology: the equation of deus with the visible mun-

dus. When Aristotle’s cave dwellers emerge from their comfortable and well-appointed

domiciles,39 it is the visual element—by no means the metaphorical “sight” that comes to

light in Plato’s allegory40—that becomes particularly important as they behold the heav-

ens for the first time, and thereby find the gods of which they had previously only heard:

‘cum repente terram et maria caelumque vidissent, nubium magnitudinem ventorumque vim cognovissent aspexissentque solem eiusque cum magni-tudinem pulchritudinemque, tum etiam efficientiam cognovissent, quod is diem efficeret toto caelo luce diffusa, cum autem terras nox opacasset, tum caelum totum cernerent astris distinctum et ornatum lunaeque luminum varietatem tum crescentis, tum senescentis, eorumque omnium ortus et oc-casus atque in omni aeternitate ratos inmutabilesque cursus — quae cum viderent, profecto et esse deos et haec tanta opera deorum esse arbi-trarentur.’41

Here in a nutshell is the core of Balbus’s theology: thanks to their pulchritudo and their

rati inmutabilesque cursus, the heavenly bodies (caelestia) were judged “both to be gods

and the works of the gods.” And here as well is the same problem that makes his own

theology inconsistent, since we might well inquire: but which of the two is it? If the stars

and planets are gods, surely they cannot be the same gods of which they themselves are

the opera. In short, this is the same nihil melius dilemma that haunts Balbus’s entire

speech. [To put it another way: Balbus’s speech proves that every Bildnis that uses the

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heavens and the earth as a Gleichnis for the God who rules them is necessarily self-

contradictory.]

By preserving Aristotle’s version of the Cave, Cicero performed a valuable ser-

vice: precisely because this “version” is better understood as a radical inversion of Pla-

to’s—but clearly no less a similitudo as a result of this inversion—it illustrates the fun-

damental and irreconcilable difference between two philosophers whose differences were

being minimized, in Cicero’s time, as well as in our own. In the first book of Cicero’s

Academica, Varro offers an account of the Old Academy according to the views of Anti-

ochus,42 the point of which is to emphasize the common ground between Plato and Aris-

totle.43 Only at the end does Varro touch on one of the fundamental disputationes44 that

separated them:

Aristoteles primus species quas paulo ante dixi labefactavit, quas Plato erat amplexatus, ut in iis quiddam divinum esse diceret.45

What makes this single sentence so important is that in the earlier passage to which it re-

fers, Varro is still using third-person plural verbs—i.e., verb forms capacious enough to

combine Plato and Aristotle46—while describing the Platonic ἰδέα, translated here as spe-

cies. In that earlier account, which we now discover for the first time that Aristotle rejects

and destroys, Varro emphasizes emancipation from the senses from the start.47 And after

explaining the vocabulary involved,48 he returns again, for emphasis, to the theory’s un-

derlying critique of sense perception, still using the highly misleading plural:

Sensus autem omnes hebetes et tardos esse arbitrantur nec percipere ullo modo res ullas quae subiectae sensibus viderentur.49

Although Varro’s account continues,50 there could scarcely be a stronger statement,

thanks to the doubled use of “any,” about the inherent and comprehensive inadequacy of

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our knowledge of the visible world. Moreover, this account of the manifestly supersensi-

ble ἰδέαι in Cicero’s Academica is sandwiched between Plato’s cautious assertion that

there is “something divine” (quiddam divinum) in them—a notion that necessarily plays

no part in De Natura Deorum, because, if it did, the dialogue would contain the actual

truth, not at best a mere image of it—and an account of physics, at least as much Stoic as

Academic,51 an account that provides the foundation for Balbus’s equation of (the sensi-

ble) mundus with deus.

If Aristotle answers Plato’s rejection of the merely sensible with his version of

the Cave, Plato had already undermined the basis of Aristotle’s later answer in his Phae-

do, a dialogue which Stull has shown was much on Cicero’s mind at the time. Masquer-

ading as physics, Socrates’ myth about ἡ ἰδέα τῆς γῆς is better understood as an anti-

physics, and is especially destructive of the theologizing astronomy that divinizes the vis-

ible world. When, having emerged from their otherwise pleasant surroundings,52 Aristo-

tle’s cave dwellers look up at the heavens, it is assumed that they are seeing the stars just

as they are.53 Without denying that there are actually stars, Socrates denies instead that

the physicist has access to any clear or untrammeled view of them: thanks to the fact that

we live in the hollows of the earth, we see the heavens through a distorting medium, ex-

actly as if we lived at the bottom of the sea.54 In language evoking the Phaedrus,55 Socra-

tes creates the image of fish breaching the sea’s surface:56 only as a fish out of water

would access to the true earth and the true light permit visual access to the true heaven.

Meanwhile, the underwater habitation of the subterranean earthling is anything but pleas-

ant: the corrupting influence of the salty brine renders whatever passes for beauty here

scarcely worthy of the name.57 Socrates’ intent in this myth is not to improve so much as

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to redefine cosmology,58 and thereby to encourage us to escape the blindness engendered

by an overreliance on vision.59 And this is, moreover, exactly what we would expect Soc-

rates to do, since, as Varro explains at the beginning of his account of the Old Academy,

he judged the caelestia as either inaccessible to our cognition, or useless to our living

well.60

It is therefore with considerable surprise that one turns to Cicero’s contemporane-

ous translation of Plato’s Timaeus, especially considering the passage with which his

translation ends:

Rerum enim optumarum cognitionem nobis oculi attulerunt. Nam haec, quae est habita de universitate oratio a nobis, haud umquam esset inventa, si neque sidera neque sol, neque caelum sub oculorum aspectum cadere potuissent.61

Here Timaeus reflects on the whole of his de universitate oratio and justly points out that

vision is the condition of its possibility: it is our expressly eyes that make possible the

rerum optimarum cognitio. And this “hymn to vision” becomes the phenomenological

basis for philosophy itself:

Nunc vero dies noctesque oculis cognitae, tum mensum annorumque con-versiones et numerum machinatae sunt et spatium temporis dimensae, et ad quaestionem totius naturae impulerunt; quibus ex rebus philosophiam adepti sumus, quo bono nullum optabilius, nullum praestantius neque da-tum est mortalium generi deorum concessu atque munere neque dabitur.62

The nullum optabilius, nullum prastantius formula, ubiquitous in Balbus’s version of an

oratio de universitate, should by now be familiar; indeed Balbus will quote a portion of

Cicero’s translation of Timaeus in his speech.63 Why wouldn’t he? Both Aristotle’s Cave

and Timaeus’ discourse—in particular the passage that Cicero’s translation emphasizes

by ending precisely here—support the basic thrust of Balbus’s theology: the visible cos-

mos can become deus only because vision discloses the regular movements of the

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caelestia.64 Thanks to Cicero’s translation of Timaeus, philosophia itself—no longer a

particular φιλοσοφίας γένος, as in Plato’s Greek65—has become the quaestio totius natu-

rae, “the investigation of the nature of the whole” (τῆς τοῦ παντὸς φύσεως ζήτησις).

In his recent paper “Cicero and the Timaeus,” David Sedley has offered a good

reason for regarding Cicero’s “translation” of the dialogue not as an unfinished fragment

but as complete,66 and this is an important step forward. To begin with, Sedley persua-

sively situates its composition between the Tusculan Disputations and De Natura De-

orum.67 After proving that Balbus quotes it,68 Sedley reconstructs the dialogue in which

Cicero intended to embed it in a conversation between a Pythagorean—through whose

persona Timaeus would speak69—and an Aristotelian about the eternity of the world.70 It

is certainly unfortunate for Sedley’s thesis that the discussion of this topic is “lost in a

lacuna,”71 but the paper’s importance scarcely depends on that thesis. In justifying the

important claim that: “Cicero did consider the Timaeus translation itself already com-

plete,” Sedley finds it necessary to explain why it ends with “the gift of eyesight,”72 i.e.,

what I have called “the hymn to vision.” Sedley offers three reasons for why “this rousing

climax was the natural place to stop,”73 but the first is the crucial one:

It presents what is probably the most anthropocentric expression of crea-tionism in the entire Timaeus, likely to be especially appealing to Cicero’s taste given his tentative approval of Stoic theology at the end of de Natura Deorum.74

Although this passage indicates that Sedley doesn’t take the crucial words propensior ad

similitudinem veritatis literally enough, he makes up for this by drawing attention to the

use of simulacrum and similitudo veri as Cicero’s translations of Plato’s εἰκών and

εἰκώς.75 Most importantly, Sedley has shown another connection between Timaeus’

“hymn to vision” and the Stoicorum de natura deorum oratio; had he pursued this con-

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nection further, he could have shed more light on why Cicero uses undique corporatus to

translate (inaccurately) the last two words of the description of the world at Timaeus

28b7-8: γέγονεν: ὁρατὸς γὰρ ἁπτός τέ ἐστιν καὶ σῶµα ἔχων.76 It is precisely the simili-

tude that emerges from the equation of mundus and deus that makes this translation at-

tractive, not its truth.

The implications of the fact that Cicero intended to place a substantial portion of

Timaeus’ discourse in the mouth of a Pythagorean are profound, and have not received

sufficient attention.77 Cicero had long recognized that the Socratic position on physics

was inconsistent with the Pythagorean themes Plato’s Socrates was often presented as

discussing in the dialogues;78 his Scipio had proposed in De Republica that it was a com-

bination of Plato’s own interest in such matters, combined with his love for Socrates that

provided the explanation.79 Thanks to the many Pythagorean elements in the dialogue,80

Plato’s Phaedo is the appropriate testing ground for this explanation. Ultimately ground-

ed on his statement about the visual origins of spiritual blindness,81 Socrates justifies his

youthful abandonment of physics82 with the geological myth of our merely submarine

access to the starry heavens. Catherine Zuckert has usefully described the theological im-

plications of Socrates’ position in Phaedo in contrast with both Timaeus and the Atheni-

an Stranger:

In contrast to the Athenian (and Timaeus), however, Socrates does not base his belief in the existence of gods on observations of the regular, hence intelligible, movements of the heavens. On the contrary, in the Phaedo we here him remind his close associates that human beings cannot directly, accurately, or completely observe the intelligible order of the heavens, so long as their minds are dulled and confused by their senses.83

If we admit the truth of Cicero’s famous and oft-quoted claim that Socrates found philos-

ophy in the heavens and called it down into the cities84—the claim, incidentally, that cre-

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ated the notion of what we now call “Presocratic Philosophy” [Note on Tzuba, IAPS, and

Marburg]—there is an important sense in which Timaeus, Aristotle, and Balbus are all

fundamentally, although of course not literally, Presocratic. The crucial claim at the cen-

ter of this talk is that Cicero’s De Natura Deorum proves that he was aware of this in the

case of the last two; more importantly, his decision to place Timaeus’ hymn to vision in

the mouth of a Pythagorean astrologer85 suggests his awareness in the first. To put it an-

other way, Balbus was both correct and overly sanguine about his own capacity when he

stated: nihil est difficilius quam a consuetudine oculorum aciem mentis abducere.86

It is important to note that Aristotle and Timaeus are not the only authorities on

caelestia that Balbus quotes: he devotes far more space to the astronomical poetry of the

young Cicero.87 Famously dismissed as an embarrassment,88 Cicero’s poetry has natural-

ly proved to be of greater concern to students of literature than philosophy,89 and, as a

result, its philosophical implications have been neglected. Why did Cicero choose Aratus

to translate? From a philosophical perspective, the probable answer is that the young Cic-

ero was also what I have called “Presocratic.” And it is also probable that it was his

youthful passion for astronomy that was the root of his later and transformed passion for

what we would call “philosophy.” Balbus’s eloquent speech leaves no doubt that the

two—passion for astronomy and philosophy—were compatible, and moreover left con-

siderable scope for rhetoric. And the fact that Cicero penned the first and still clearest

statement of the transformation wrought by Socrates, suggests that he had first-hand ex-

perience of it. Plato’s Phaedo myth and the Allegory of the Cave shattered the compati-

bility of philosophy and physics, and relegated astronomy to the shadows or the sea; the

forthright Xenophon strengthened the case.90 Nevertheless, Cicero’s youthful passion for

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astronomy is still on display in the Somnium Scipionis,91 i.e., long after he has outgrown

it. For the mature Cicero—who well remembers the alternative view—divinized astron-

omy remained a mere simulacrum of the truth. But it was his own youthful and outgrown

passion for the stars that made it possible for him to do something that no other students

of Plato had done: detach Plato from his Timaeus. Indeed, the moment of Cicero’s trans-

formation from Presocratic theologian to Platonist may have been recorded in another

youthful poem, mentioned only by Plutarch:92 its subject was Glaucus of the Sea, who

appears in Plato’s Republic as an image of the distortions that mar the earthbound soul.93

If Diskin Clay is correct that it is to this Glaucus that Socrates refers when introducing

the Phaedo myth,94 and if the young poet used the transformation of Glaucus as a meta-

phor for his own emancipation from “the graven image” of astronomy—the “unknown

juices” being what Socrates calls ἡ Γλαύκου τέχνη in Phaedo—then perhaps an echo of

that important moment can still be heard in the words of Ovid’s Glaucus:

vix bene conbiberant ignotos guttura sucos, cum subito trepidare intus praecordia sensi alteriusque rapi naturae pectus amore; nec potui restare diu ‘repetenda’ que ‘numquam terra, vale!’ dixi corpusque sub aequora mersi.95

There is a strange melancholy that hangs over modern philosophy: one occasion-

ally senses a wistful nostalgia for a happier time when the sciences had not yet broken

away and abandoned their mother. While for Newton, “science” was still philosophia

naturalis, for us it is a panoply of autonomous disciplines, and the rump of philosophy is

now confined to analytical or methodological discussions that scarcely concern those

who break fresh ground in the sciences. From a Platonic perspective, however, this story

looks very different: it is not modern science that has now emancipated itself from phi-

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losophy, but rather the reverse: for a bright and shiny moment, philosophy emancipated

itself from physics. Although Parmenides—who relegated cosmology to the realm of

opinion96—was the real pioneer, this emancipation has justly come to bear the name of

Socrates:

Socrates mihi videtur, id quod constat inter omnes, primus a rebus oc-cultis et ab ipsa natura involutis, in quibus omnes ante eum philosophi oc-cupati fuerunt, avocavisse philosophiam et ad vitam commune adduxisse, ut de virtutibus et vitiis omninoque de bonis rebus et malis quaereret, caelestia autem vel procul esse a nostra cognition censeret vel, si maxime cognita essent, nihil tamen ad bene vivendum.97

Regardless of who led it, the important thing is that the Socratic revolution failed: ancient

philosophy’s post-cosmological emancipation from science—its liberation from the ac-

tive concern with the visible mundus in general, and the caelestia in particular—was

short-lived. When Aristotle identified the two principles of Parmenides as fire and

earth,98 and claimed that it was “Plato in the Timaeus” who identified χώρα and ὕλη,99 he

wasn’t simply wrong on matters of fact, he was making a far more significant error. The

construction of a deliberately deceptive cosmology that could be nothing more than likely

was the chosen genre of philosophers operating in an intellectual climate where physics

was dominant and philosophy marginalized, the same climate, it should be added, in

which we operate today. Cicero’s Stoicorum de natura deorum oratio belongs to the

same genre as Parmenides’ “Way of Opinion” and Plato’s Timaeus, and that is why he

calls it propensior ad similitudinem veritatis. Far from an endorsement of Balbus, Cice-

ro’s words force the student to continue the search for the truth itself, by unmasking divi-

nized physics as nothing more than—to paraphrase Goethe—a vergängliche Gleichnis.

17

Read in this light, there is no inconsistency between Cicero’s final “verdict” and

his justly famous attack on authorial auctoritas in book 1, which he then follows with

three sentences that likewise deserve attention:

Qui autem admirantur nos hanc potissimum disciplinam secutos, his quat-tuor Academicis libris satis responsum videtur. Nec vero desertarum relic-tarumque rerum patrocinium suscepimus; non enim hominum interitu sen-tentiae quoque occidunt, sed lucem auctoris fortasse desiderant.100

Although his presentation—and, of course, the same is true of my presentation as well—

lacks the lux of earlier auctores, and that obviously means Plato, Cicero insists that he is

not reviving something dead by undertaking the Academic brief (patrocinium), a theme

that will receive further elaboration in De Senectute and De Amicitia.101 And in the next

sentence, he describes this Socratic inheritance as the kind of philosophizing whose basis

(ratio) involves discoursing against all while openly approving none:

Ut haec in philosophia ratio contra omnia disserendi nullamque rem aperte iudicandi profecta a Socrate, repetita ab Arcesila, confirmata a Carneade usque ad nostram viguit aetatem; quam nunc prope modum or-bam esse in ipsa Graecia intellego.102

This is what Cicero accomplishes in De Natura Deorum: he has written a dialogue that

forces his readers to find the truth for themselves, thereby taking a step beyond his own

De Oratore. The important word here is aperte, because the truth actually is present in

the dialogue but hidden:103 the Stoic identification of deus and mundus is both incon-

sistent and false, and necessarily creates nothing more than a similitudo veritatis. There is

clearly a sense in which Cicero owed all this to Plato’s own εἰκὼς µῦθος: Timaeus was

his model, and in the wake of Aristotle, the Stoics, and Antiochus,104 it was more neces-

sary than ever to recreate what only he had found there thanks to Phaedo and “the art of

Glaucus”: a Socratic attack on physics.105 From the fragment containing his translation, it

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is evident that he intended to press this attack in a more dialogic form, subjecting the dis-

course of Timaeus—now placed in the mouth of Nigidius—to Carneadean criticism.106

But there is a good reason why he turned to another project, and completed it instead. In

his De Natura Deorum, Cicero proved himself to be Platonis aemulus by creating a se-

cond masterpiece in three books, once again making it revolve around a highly dialectical

book 2. But this time, unlike De Oratore, he had written a dialogue without Crassus, a

dialogue in which no interlocutor would be permitted to speak the truth openly, and

which will therefore continue to keep its readers wondering, just as it was intended to do,

exactly as it has been doing for the last two thousand years.

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Notes 1 William Stull, “Reading the Phaedo in Tusculan Disputations 1.” Classical Philology 107, no. 1 (January 2012), 38-52, 48n23: “In undertaking to persuade himself by means of rationes, Plato was of course violating the Pythagorean principle of ipse dixit, which Cicero describes as a matter of preferring auctoritas to ratio at Nat. D. 1.10.” Stull’s no-tion of Plato’s self-persuasion (see 43-48) arises from Phaedo 91a7-b1 and Tusculan Disputations 1.49. 2 Tusculan Disputations 1.39: errare mehercule malo cum Platone, quem tu quanti facias scio et quem ex tuo ore admiror, quam cum istis vera sentire. See 46n20 for a valuable note on Hannah Arendt. 3 Asked by M. whether he has read Phaedo, A. replies at Tusculan Disputations 1.24: Fe-ci mehercule, et quidem saepius; sed nescio quo modo, dum lego, adsentior, cum posui librum et mecum ipse de inmortalitate animorum coepi cogitare, adsensio omnis illa elabitur. The oath mehercule appears twice in the book; see previous note. 4 De Natura Deorum 1.10: Nec vero probare soleo id, quod de Pythagoreis accepimus, quos ferunt, si quid adfirmarent in disputando, cum ex iis quaereretur, quare ita esset, respondere solitos “ipse dixit”; ipse autem erat Pythagoras: tantum opinio praeiudicata poterat, ut etiam sine ratione valeret auctoritas. 5 Stull, “Reading the Phaedo,” 45: “A.’s experience of the Phaedo in Tusculans 1 consti-tutes not only a reminiscence of this striking episode but also an extrapolation and a reen-actment. Instead of stopping with Echecrates, Cicero has gone a step further, as it were, by including A. in the roll call of enraptured audiences and extending the scope of the inadequate discourse to encompass the Phaedo as a whole.” 6 Stull, “Reading the Phaedo,” 48. 7 Stull, “Reading the Phaedo,” 45. His next sentence is worthy quoting as well: “It is a brilliantly executed maneuver: instead of simply denying the relevance of Plato’s work, Cicero reinscribes its concerns in a post-Platonic setting.” 8 De Natura Deorum 1.10. 9 E.g., Menexenus. 10 See Jeffrey Walker, The Genuine Teachers of this Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiq-uity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), chapter one (“Cicero’s Anto-nius”). 11 De Natura Deorum 3.95. 12 David Fott, “The Politico-Philosophical Character of Cicero’s Verdict in De Natura Deorum” in Walter Nicgorski (ed.), Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, 152-180 (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). 13 Fott, “Politico-Philosophical Character,” 155-58. 14 Fott, “Politico-Philosophical Character,” 175: “Cotta is deficient as an Academic spokesman. . . .He fails philosophically because he slips into dogmatic naturalism. He fails politically because his speeches have the effect, and maybe the purpose, of under-mining support for religion.” 15 De Natura Deorum 3.95. 16 De Natura Deorum 1.39 and 1.41. 17 See also De Natura Deorum 1.1, 1.13, 1.23, 1.29, 1.34, 1.41, 1.61, and 1.94. 18 De Natura Deorum 1.41 and 1.123.

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19 De Natura Deorum 1.1: Cum multae res in philosophia nequaquam satis adhuc expli-catae sint, tum perdifficilis, Brute, quod tu minime ignoras, et perobscura quaestio est de natura deorum… 20 De Natura Deorum 3.93. 21 Fott, “Politico-Philosophical Character,” 155. 22 De Natura Deorum 2.80. 23 Notice that Spinoza’s deus sive natura is anticipated by Balbus’s opening use of ad-ministrari at 2.3: Primum docent esse deos, deinde quales sint, tum mundum ab his ad-ministrari with 2.85: (natura [ablative] mundum administrari. Preceding this statement, the relevant ablative is the providentia or consilio deorum at 2.70, 73, 74, 75, and 77. See following note. 24 The problem is introduced early in the dialogue by Velleius, and never satisfactorily resolved; he is speaking of inconsistencies in Aristotle at De Natura Deorum 1.33: Aris-totelesque in tertio de philosophia libro multa turbat a magistro suo Platone dissentiens; modo enim menti tribuit omnem divinitatem, modo mundum ipsum deum dicit esse, modo alium quendam praeficit mundo. The purpose of the emendation, i.e., inserting non be-fore dissentiens, is to save Antiochus’ consistency, an unworthy project for a Ciceronian. 25 De Natura Deorum 2.21, 2.30, 2.36, and 2.45. 26 De Natura Deorum 2.3, 2.73-5, 2.77-8, 2.82, 2.85-6, and 2.132. 27 De Natura Deorum 2.46: mundo autem certe nihil est melius. 28 De Natura Deorum 2.18: Atqui certe nihil omnium rerum melius est mundo, nihil praestantius, nihil pulchrius, nec solum nihil est, sed ne cogitari quidem quicquam melius potest. Et si ratione et sapientia nihil est melius, necesse est haec inesse in eo, quod op-timum esse concedimus. 29 De Natura Deorum 2.39: Est autem nihil mundo perfectius, nihil virtute melius; igitur mundi est propria virtus. 30 De Natura Deorum 2.45 and 2.77. 31 De Natura Deorum 1.121. 32 De Natura Deorum 3.20. 33 Cf. De Natura Deorum 1.85-87 and 123: Verius est igitur nimirum illud, quod familiar-is omnium nostrum Posidonius disseruit in libro quinto de natura deorum, nullos esse de-os Epicuro videri, quaeque is de deis inmortalibus dixerit invidiae detestandae gratia dixisse. 34 See Fott, “Politico-Philosophical Character,” 174-75, ending with: “He [sc. Cotta] fails politically because his speeches have the effect, and maybe the purpose, of undermining support for religion.” 35 Cf. Natura Deorum 1.61 (Cotta is speaking): ‘Quaeritur primum in ea quaestione, quae est de natura deorum, sintne dei necne sint.’ 36 De Natura Deorum 1.123. 37 Augustine Contra Academicos 2.40: Quomodo enim approbat sapiens, aut quomodo simile sequitur veri, cum ipsum verum quod sit ignoret? 38 Cf. Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1983), 242: “some passages of great splendor, if excessive length, on the beauty and rationality of the universe”.

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39 De Natura Deorum 2.95: sub terra semper habitavissent bonis et inlustribus domiciliis, quae essent ornata signis atque picturis. 40 Plato Republic 516a5-b6. 41 De Natura Deorum 2.95 42 Academica 1.13-34. 43 Academica 1.17: Platonis autem auctoritate, qui varius et multiplex et copiosus fuit, una et consentiens duobus vocabulis philosophiae forma instituta est Academicorum et Peripateticorum, qui rebus congruentes nominibus differebant. Cf. 22. 44 Following the manuscripts at Academica 1.33. 45 Academica 1.33. 46 Cf. Academica 1.19. 47 Academica 1.30: Quamquam oriretur a sensibus tamen non esse indicium veritatis in sensibus. 48 Academica 1.30: hanc illi ‘ἰδέαν’ appellabant, iam a Platone ita nominatam, nos recte ‘speciem’ possumus dicere. 49 Academica 1.31. 50 Academica 1.32: Scientiam autem nusquam esse censebant nisi in animi notionibus atque rationibus. 51 Academica 1.27-29. 52 De Natura Deorum 2.95: …bonis et inlustribus domiciliis, quae essent ornata signis atque picturis instructaque rebus his omnibus, quibus abundant i, qui beati putantur. 53 See Stephen Menn, “Aristotle and Plato on God as Nous and as the Good.” Review of Metaphysics 45, no. 3 (March 1992), 543-573, on 564n27. 54 Phaedo 108c3-d5. 55 Cf. Phaedo 109d2 and 109e2-3 with Phaedrus 249c1-4. 56 Phaedo 109e3-5. 57 Phaedo 110a1-8. 58 Phaedo 114d8-115a3. 59 Phaedo 99e2-4. 60 Academica 1.15, quoted below. 61 Timaeus 52.6-10 in Remo Giomini (ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis Scripta, fasc. 46 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1975). 62 Timaeus 52.10-17. 63 See David Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus” in Malcolm Schofield (ed.), Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the First Century BC: New Directions for Philosophy, 187-205 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 64 De Naturum Deorum 2.55; cf. 3.24. 65 Peter Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus: Translation, Glossary, Appendices, and Introducto-ry Essay (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2001), 78n65: “Most translators take the phrase philosophias genos as referring to philosophy as a whole or in general, but the context seems to be the praise of astronomy in particular.” 66 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 200-201. 67 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 189. 68 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 191-193. 69 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 201.

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70 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 195-196. 71 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 199. 72 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 200. 73 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 201. 74 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 201; the other two are “Cicero wanted to halt the account of creation before the deeply puzzling nature of matter was broached,” and it is “in this first section of Timaeus’ cosmogony that the major part of his speech’s mathe-matical cosmology is to be found.” 75 Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 202. 76 See Sedley, “Cicero and the Timaeus,” 198n25. 77 Not even from A. E. Taylor, “the main thesis” of whose monumental A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928) is that “the teaching of Timaeus can be shown to be in detail what we should expect in a fifth-century Italian Pythagorean who was also a medical man” (11). As Sedley realizes (“Cicero and the Timaeus,” 201), he is on weak ground when he suggests: “It is not unlikely that Plato was himself described as here voicing the cosmogony of the Pythagorean Timaeus.” 78 De Republica 1.16; cf. Xenophon Memorabilia 4.7.2-8. 79 De Republica 1.16. 80 Cf. David Roochnik, “The Wisdom of Plato’s Phaedo” in Michel Ferrari and George Potworowski (eds.), Teaching for Wisdom: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Fostering Wisdom, 179-188 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008). 81 Phaedo 99e2-4. 82 Phaedo 96a5-100a3. 83 Catherine H. Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 834; cf. 809. 84 Tusculum Disputations 5.11. 85 Suetonius, Divus Augustus 94.5: Quo natus est [sc. Octavian] die, cum de Catilinae coniuratione ageretur in curia [sc. in 63 B.C.] et Octavius [his father] ob uxoris puerper-ium serius affuisset, nota et vulgata res est P. Nigidium, comperta morae causa, ut horam quoque partus acceperit, affirmasse dominum terrarum orbi natum. 86 De Natura Deorum 2.45; the importance of these words is emphasized by 3.20. 87 De Natura Deorum 2.104-115. 88 Juvenal Satires10.122-24. 89 Cf. Peter E. Knox, “Cicero as Hellenistic Poet.” Classical Quarterly 61 (n.s.), no. 1 (2011), 192–204. 90 Xenophon Memorabilia 1.1.11-15. 91 Hence the commentary of Macrobius. See also Emma Gee, “Cicero’s Astronomy.” Classical Quarterly 51 (n.s.), no. 2 (2001), 520-536. 92 Plutarch Life of Cicero 2. 93 Republic 611c6-d5. 94 Diskin Clay, “The Art of Glaukos (Plato Phaedo 108d4-9).” American Journal of Phi-lology 106, no. 2 (Summer 1985), 230-236. 95 Ovid Metamorphoses 13.944-48; cf. Aeschylus, Fragmenta 29 (ΓΛΑΥΚΟΣ ΠΟΝΤΙΟΣ): καὶ γεύοµαι πως τῆς ἀειζώου πόας. 96 See Parmenides (Diels-Kranz) B1.28-32 and B8.50-64.

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97 Academica 1.157. 98 Aristotle Physics 1.5, 188a20-22; cf. W. D. Ross, Aristotle’s Physics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 487-88, ending with: “The identification of the second µορφή with earth must be regarded as a mistake.” 99 Aristotle Physics 4.2, 209b11-12. See Ross, Aristotle’s Physics, 566, where he appro-priately quotes (and at greater length) Taylor, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, 347, be-ginning with: “It is also, as Zeller said, not true that what T. teaches [note again that Aris-totle does not, like Taylor, distinguish ‘T.’ (i.e., Timaeus) from Plato] that matter is space.” 100 Academica 1.11. 101 See §9 below. 102 Academica 1.11. 103 Following Plato’s example, Cicero knows how to put the truth into the mouths of its enemies: cf. Republic 343c3 (Thrasymachus) and De Republica (Phlius, likewise on jus-tice): maxime munifica et liberalis, et quae omnis magis quam sepse diligit, aliis nata po-tius quam sibi. See also Critias 107c6-d2. Although the words of Velleius at De Natura Deorum 1.121 have already been quoted, they bear repetition: Quid enim melius aut quid praestantius bonitate et beneficentia? 104 Thanks to whom the Socratic approach is nunc prope modum orba est, as it was not Philone vivo (Academica 2.17), thanks to whom usque ad nostram viguit aetatem. 105 Cf. Academica 1.122: ‘Latent ista omnia, Luculle, crassis occultata et circumfuse ten-ebris, ut nulla acies humani ingenii tanta sit quae pentrare in caelum, terram intrare, possit.’ Note that Cicero’s spur toward Copernicanism (cf. Academica 1.123 with H. Rackham’s note on 405 of the Loeb) is not introduced to promulgate a new truth but to destabilize the traditional account. 106 Timaeus 1.1-3: Multa sunt a nobis et in Academicis conscripta contra physicos et saepe P. Nigidius Carneadeo more et modo disputata.