Introduction

Summary

For approximately the last thirty years, Cicero’s reputation as a philosopher has been rising after close to a century of very low esteem. The alleged reasons for this disrepute are numerous and varied. Cicero was Roman, and Romans were thought to be neither scientific nor philosophical. He wrote in Latin, when the genuine language of philosophy was and is Greek. No original thinker, he was not so much a philosopher as translator and compiler, pasting together various philosophical works from the second and first century bce. This he did in his spare time, for Cicero was an amateur philosopher. His main pursuits were politics and judicial advocacy. When he turned to philosophy, he was content to adopt a form of eclecticism amenable to his own changing status in the troubled last decades of the Roman Republic. This short introduction won’t be covering Cicero’s philosophical works and their context (for which the reader should consult Chapter 1); it aims only to present the various and complementary ways in which this Companion, building on earlier studies, may answer these charges and allow us to gain a more accurate and richer picture of Cicero as a philosopher.