How to Run a Country
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Detail from Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, by Benjamin West
Yesterday I read How to Run a Country, a wide-ranging collection of excerpts from the political writings of Cicero and part of Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. I’ve reviewed another volume from the series, Cicero’s How to Grow Old, here before. While How to Grow Old translated a single long treatise, How to Run a Country anthologizes bits and pieces from Cicero’s works and organizes them thematically, covering such topics as leadership, corruption, and war.
So far I haven’t found the anthology or selection volumes of the series as fulfilling as those that translate a complete single text—those like How to Grow Old, How to Win an Election, a practical treatise by Cicero’s brother Quintus, or another favorite, Cicero’s How to Be a Friend—and as How to Run a Country was one of the very first volumes published in this series it’s clear that the series hadn’t nailed the format yet. But it’s still very good. How to Run a Country, thanks especially to the short, thoughtful introduction by editor and translator Philip Freeman, gives the reader a good precis of Cicero’s political thought in a format that can be read in about forty-five minutes.
Cicero as traditionalist, moderate, and statesman
In his book Roman Realities, Finley Hooper writes that
Cicero was a man of the middle class all his life. He opposed the selfish interests of a senatorial oligarchy and the selfish interests of the Populares, who had their way in the Tribal Assembly. When one side appeared to have the upper hand, he leaned toward the other. He was very conscious of a decadent ruling class which insisted on its right to rule regardless of whether it ruled well or not. The demagogues of Clodius’s stripe were even more frightening to him, and most of the time their activities kept him estranged from the people.
Freeman, in his introduction to How to Run a Country, describes Cicero as “a moderate conservative,” though I might have said traditionalist instead of or as well as moderate, and notes that this is “an increasingly rare breed in our modern world.” Cicero “believed in working with other parties for the good of his country and its people. Rather than a politician, his ideas are those of a statesman, another category whose ranks today grow ever more diminished.”
I emphasize the traditionalism of Cicero’s thought because, as we will see below, he was keenly aware of the collapse of tradition and his existence as a relict in a decaying republic. As Hooper notes elsewhere in his book, “The old Roman days of honor and virtue were almost beyond recall to all save men like Cicero.”
Freeman’s ten lessons to take from Cicero
In his introduction, Freeman offers the following ten-point summary of Cicero’s key political ideas. I only explore a few of them in the quotations below, but it should be clear how each reflects Cicero’s broader philosophy. I include the ten points without the paragraph-length explanations Freeman provides after each:
There are universal laws that govern the conduct of human affairs.
The best form of government embraces a balance of powers.
Leaders should be of exceptional character and integrity.
Keep your friends close—and your enemies closer.
Intelligence is not a dirty word.
Compromise is the key to getting things done.
Don’t raise taxes—unless you absolutely have to.
Immigration makes a country stronger.
Never start an unjust war.
Corruption destroys a nation.
Rather than write a longer, more traditional review—and because this is election day—I want to give most of the space here to Cicero himself, and I’ll conclude with the ten lessons in politics that Freeman argues we can learn from Cicero’s thought. Despite the often vast differences in cultural climate and basic assumptions about the world, the specific issues Cicero and his contemporaries faced are still relevant, and still offer us something to learn and reflect upon.
All quotations below are Freeman’s translations from How to Run a Country.
What we fight for
To continue on the thought of tradition and custom, in Pro Sestio (In Defense of Sestius), a legal case defending a friend of his brought up on charges by political enemies, Cicero describes the purposes for which the Republic was founded, what kind of dangers threaten it, and what kind of men it takes to defend the Republic:
The founding principles of our Republic, the essence of peace with honor, the values that our leaders should defend and guard with their very lives if necessary are these: respecting religion, discovering the will of the gods, supporting the power of the magistrates, honoring the authority of the senate, obeying the law, valuing tradition, upholding the courts and their verdicts, practicing integrity, defending the provinces and our allies, and standing up for our country, our military, and our treasury.
Building on these “founding principles,” in De Officiis (On Duties), a philosophical treatise from late in his life, Cicero describes the job of the state and the things it should and should not handle—especially when it comes to the perennial interests of the revolutionaries and demagogues:
Whoever governs a country must first see to it that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. When Philippus was a tribune, he proposed a ruinous law to distribute land, though when his bill was voted down he took it very well and accepted defeat graciously. However, when he was defending the bill he pandered shamelessly to the common people, saying that there weren’t two thousand people left in the city who owned any property. That kind of hyperbole must be condemned, along with any proposals advocating an equal distribution of land. . . .
As for those politicians who pretend they are friends of the common people and try to pass laws redistributing property and drive people out of their homes or champion legislation forgiving loans, I say they are undermining the very foundations of our state. They are destroying social harmony, which cannot exist when you take away money from some to give it to others. They are also destroying fairness, which vanishes when people cannot keep what rightfully belongs to them.
On a similar note, from Pro Sestio again:
For among the crowds are those who would destroy our country through revolution and upheaval, either because they feel guilty about their own misdeeds and fear punishment, or because they are deranged enough to long for sedition and civil discord, or because of their own financial mismanagement they prefer to bring the whole country down in flames rather than burn alone. When such people find leaders to help them carry out their wicked plans, the Republic is tossed about on the waves. When this happens, those helmsmen who guide our country must be vigilant and use all their skill and diligence to preserve the principles I mentioned above and steer our country safely home with peace and honor.
What it takes
Cicero uses the “helmsman” metaphor over and over again in his writing on politics; it appears multiple times just in this short collection, and it is a useful one, evoking as it does the manifold and constantly shifting dangers that threaten the body politic and the myriad skills required of the captain of a vessel. In Pro Sestio, Cicero provides the following shortlist of necessary skills: “Those who would be guardians of such important principles must be people of great courage, great ability, and great resolve.”
To return to the helmsman metaphor, Cicero develops the picture in greater detail in discussing the art of compromise in a letter to his friend Lentulus Spinther:
In politics it is irresponsible to take an unwavering stand when circumstances are always evolving and good men change their minds. Clinging to the same opinion no matter the cost has never been considered a virtue among statesmen. When at sea, it is best to run before a storm if your ship can’t make it to harbor. But if you can find safety by tacking back and forth, only a fool would hold a straight course rather than change directions and reach home. In the same way, a wise statesman should make peace with honor for his country the ultimate goal, as I have often said. It is our vision that must remain constant, not our words.
And what else? Naturally the most gifted and influential speaker of his day has ideas about the ability of a statesman to communicate. From De Oratore (On the Orator):
If a person has not acquired a deep knowledge of all the necessary disciplines involved in oratory, his speech will be an endless prattle of empty and silly words. An orator must be able to choose the right language and arrange his words carefully. He must also understand the full range of emotions that nature has given us, for the ability to rouse or calm a crowd is the greatest test of both the understanding and the practical ability of a speaker. An orator also needs a certain charm and with the cultured ways of a gentleman, and the ability to strike fiercely when attacking an opponent. In addition he needs a subtle grace and sophistication. Finally, an orator must have a keen mind capable of remembering a vast array of relevant precedents and examples from history, along with a thorough knowledge of the law and civil statutes.
This goes deeper than mere rhetorical technique—the speaker’s manner and style of speaking not only should be but is illustrative of his character. Food for thought.
Why we fail
Good men are made, not born, but in some generations it is easier to cultivate virtue. Elsewhere in De Officiis, he writes “Indeed, when you praise the integrity of a man you are also praising the age in which he lived.”
As I mentioned, Cicero lived among a decayed and corrupted generation in a decaying and corrupted Republic, and bore with him a lifelong cognizance of the fact. In De Re Publica (On the State), which only survives in fragments, Cicero takes this line from the Roman poet Ennius—“The Roman state is founded on ancient customs and its men”—and meditates on how the Republic has failed and who is to blame:
The poet who wrote these words so brief and true seems to me to have heard them from a divine oracle. For neither men by themselves without a state based on strong customs nor traditions without men to defend them could have established and maintained a republic such as ours whose power stretches so far and wide. Before our time, the cherished customs of our forefathers produced exceptional and admirable men who preserved the ways and institutions of our ancestors.
But now our republic looks like a beautiful painting faded with age. Our generation has not only failed to restore the colors of this masterpiece, but we have not even bothered to preserve its general form and outline. What now remains of the ancient ways of our country the poet declares we were founded upon? These traditions have so sunk into oblivion that we neither practice them nor even remember what they were. And what shall I say about the men? For the reason our customs have passed away is that the people who once upheld them no longer exist. We should be put on trial as if for a capital crime to explain why this disaster has happened. But there is no defense we can give. Our country survives only in words, not as anything of substance. We have lost it all. We have only ourselves to blame.
Freeman titles this excerpt “Cicero’s Epilogue: The Fallen State.”
More if you’re interested
I recommend How to Run and Country and all of the other volumes of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, especially those by Cicero. I return to Cicero again and again because of the truths—the “permanent things”—that he tapped into and related both in word and example. I think it is especially important to return to the thought of men like Cicero as our culture goes more and more overtly to war with the truth. As you might gather from the quotation I chose to end on—and the one that Freeman ends his collection with—I am not sanguine about the future. But I do not despair, either.
I explore this poignant mixture of grief, resignation, and paradoxical hope—and hint a bit at where to look for hope—in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, which dramatizes the day politics and tyranny finally caught up to this champion of the Republic. I hope you’ll check it out, and that you’ll read it in light of the real man’s thought.
I also recommend Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, and any of the works by Cicero quoted here, especially De Officiis.
