Prosimus aliquid civibus nostris otiosi: The cultural contribution of Cicero's philosophy

Production of a body of philosophical work as a primary occupation for a Roman statesman is an act that requires explanation. Romans were hostile to philosophy as generally foreign and, in particular, incompatible with fulfilling one's duty as a citizen in the service of the state. Cicero himself was acutely aware that the project he was undertaking was something of a cultural paradox. His goals were traditional: to provide new resources for the segment of the Roman elite he most identified with, or, as he put it, to benefit the state. The way in which he proposed to accomplish this, however, was new and unorthodox: translation of Greek philosophical knowledge into Latin thus making it available to a larger portion of the elite than before. Particularly innovative was his manner of integrating Greek sources with Roman heritage and exemplars. This body of work is also shaped by the political circumstances surrounding its composition: a statesman and an intellectual, Cicero is trying to create a dignified place for himself under a new kind of regime, Caesar's one-man rule. This dissertation is an investigation of the facets of the elite social and cultural establishment that oppose his enterprise as well as the counterbalancing resources he draws on to make his project acceptable to various segments of the potential readership. A close study of the battles Cicero stages between these two sets of forces in the prefaces to his treatises, it contributes to a better understanding of a body of work that is important both in the history of philosophy and in the cultural history of the late Republic. It provides an important new perspective on Cicero's own conception of his philosophical project and adds to the picture of the broader patterns of contemporary intellectual life.;The first two chapters contextualize Cicero's project by considering other roughly contemporary texts that attempt to broaden the field of acceptable intellectual endeavor and Cicero's contemporary correspondence. The following three chapters discuss the political and cultural dimensions of the expressed statements of goals found in the prefaces and of the implicit rhetoric of self-presentation that they perform.