As a classicist—one who’s very interested in the politics of literature and in the question of how we can use ancient texts as an ethical resource beyond the horizons of classics as a discipline—this book is a really fascinating experiment. What’s great about it is that it holds an awareness of the fact that, as Bufacchi says early on—it’s a familiar cliché (and potentially quite a dubious project) to “explore current affairs through the lens of ancient Rome”—Boris Johnson gets short shrift at several points in the book!—so this is not straightforwardly about looking to another great white man as a model for a new kind of politics in the face of right-wing populism. What it does instead is to commit to thinking with Cicero, almost as a means of reinvigorating thinking itself as an ethical practice that’s antithetical to populism. So the notion that Cicero is an inspirational exemplum is both an honest one in the book and a slightly mischievous provocation, I felt—and I appreciated the strong nudge to go and actually read works like the De Officiis, De Re Publica, and even the De Senectute, to get to know them, to navigate their strangeness, the untranslatability of concept words like aequabilitas, for instance, or the different uses of the adjective popularis that ask us to make distinctions, to deliberate, think for ourselves. The book asks for active engagement, which is part of its overarching point that reading Cicero allows us to ask questions—about the relationship between politics and ethics, and about why political philosophers today are usually not active politically themselves or have contempt for political science—that have a different configuration because we’re asking them now, in 2024. For Cicero, philosophy and politics are inseparable; philosophy for him is a sociopolitical and ethical praxis—this seems to be what Bufacchi finds most exciting thing about Cicero, and Bufacchi is putting his money where his mouth is in being a political philosopher who is actively involved in politics in his own community. There is, as Bufacchi implies, something slightly counter-cultural about this way of being a political philosopher that you are cultivating and exploring in this book, and that also confirms the extent to which populism has seeped into mainstream, even apparently anti-populist politics. As Bufacchi says, political philosophers or academics aren’t usually politicians (Rory Stewart was never going to become prime minister in the UK), while actual politicians have little interest in political philosophy and must not be seen as “too intellectual,” for fear of being branded, in the populist logic, as the evil elite. One might imagine this populist anti-intellectualism sneering at the idea reading Cicero, by default.

But we have of course had a proudly classicist prime minister in the UK, who combined right-wing populism with a public school boy’s elitism and elitist construction of Classics as core training for the white male ruling class. The thing about populism is that it does not have to resolve or dwell on its own contradictions. But—apart from arguing that Boris Johnson was wrong in being mean about Cicero in The Dream of Rome!—what Bufacchi’s book is advocating for is a particular attitude in our engagement with ancient texts—as Bufacchi says on p. 115: “developing a democratic culture is a slow process, requiring a lot of patience . . . deliberation is essentially what democracies are about, and the process of deliberation involves taking time to listen to others, to evaluate their arguments, to ponder before responding.” That means understanding that meaning is context-specific, that interpretation is an intersubjective process that happens in a community, one that values difference and does not enact a logic of domination whereby the scientific interpreter is imagined to exert his infallible expertise on an inert text to extract its hidden truths. This logic of domination is precisely what populism must uphold and cultivate, in its imagining of the “people” as a homogenous unit defined in opposition to “the other”—the deviant, and/or the elite, which is some kind of threat to the people and must stand “outside,” even though it is also insidiously inside the nation state: our culture wars are in a sense a civil war. Another important conservative populist trope is the idea that there’s a supposed order that existed before what is constructed as the elite corrupted and destroyed it, and that needs now to be re-established.

In the history of my discipline, “Classics” has often stood for that order (which is one way of understanding the contradiction of Boris Johnson the Virgil-quoting populist). This is the make-America-great-again, take-back-control discourse that ushered Trump into power and pushed the Brexit vote. Often this ideal is spatial as well as temporal—it’s about a particular relationship to the past, but it’s also about a drive to reinstate the hard borders that constitute the sovereign state and a sovereign ideal of impenetrable masculinity. Populism maintains that the old order is being demolished by the elites, who are corrupt, crazy and don’t believe in boundaries—which implies a sexual promiscuity, and is also gendered as feminine, as well as raced and classed. Cue conspiracy theories about Covid as a genocide plot linked to global paedophile rings run by Hillary Clinton, or Andrew Tate calling feminism a “chaotic satanic cult.” Of course there’s also left wing populism—the more Russell Brand type, that has a similar narrative about the evil elite—which is seductive in part because of its apparent similarity to Marxist critiques of capitalism. Marxists would also claim that there is an elite and that they are controlling things in their own interests, but what separates it from populism is populism’s idea of the people as a homogenous unit, a tribe unified by ethnic or cultural homogeneity, rather than by the materialist idea of a class. In other words populism is identitarian rather than materialist. Just as aristocrat Catiline sold himself as being “of the people,” then, so rich businessmen like Trump can claim to be on the side of the poor and disenfranchised because of shared beliefs.

One of the most dangerous features of populism, as the book recognizes, is that it uses the language of democracy to make claims that are completely antithetical to democracy. Viktor Orbán calls his regime an “illiberal democracy,” for example, which is of course a contradiction in terms. As Bufacchi explores, through Cicero, democracy is all about patient deliberation, active listening, free exchange of views, working out some way forward together, and heeding an ethical demand to attend to each other’s vulnerabilities and dependencies. In populism there is no room for disagreement, as anyone who disagrees with the popular position can be turned into the “other,” the elite, and discredited as illogical, perverse, dangerously out of reality. Opposing views are automatically delegitimized, and its proponents dehumanized—whereas democracy involves recognizing and attending to your interlocutor’s unique and relational personhood.

So in reading this book, I’m reminded of two things. One is that approaching Cicero, as Bufacchi does, not with the aim of acquiring a body of knowledge that has cultural capital as “Classics” but in the spirit of creative engagement in encountering an Other who might have an impact on us or change our minds, itself puts into practice a resistance to populism’s primitive defenses. The second is that in current iterations of populism on the right and on the left, we’re not dealing with ideologies that are clearly delineated or consistent; populist movements are able to morph and attach themselves to all kinds of other discourses, about for example emancipation and liberation—especially through social media. This is where slow, close, and critical reading of Cicero is helpful, as it draws us into urgent debates about what it means to set boundaries, where and how we “draw the line” and when that serves the principles of democratic community, or of identitarianism; about how we can passionately critique those who are invested in populism’s fascist potential while not “othering” them in ways that are complicit in populism, with its paranoid-schizoid splitting. Cicero, it could be argued, did a lot of this himself—for example in his famous speech against Catiline, in which he riles against Catiline’s “madness” and brands it a perverted lust that seduces naïve young men. But the point of Bufacchi’s book is not to preserve some nostalgic vision of Cicero that glosses over ways in which his rhetoric might also be appropriated by populists. It’s more about taking seriously, as Cicero does, the responsibility to be able to hold different and shifting views in a community of citizens treated as equals.

Vittorio Bufacchi’s recent book Why Cicero Matters is a contribution to the Bloomsbury series Why Philosophy Matters. Yet when it comes to Cicero and his writings, various disciplinary approaches are in play and overlap. Hence the question of “why Cicero matters” is important not only for philosophers, but also for Classicists, Latinists in particular. Presumably, when asked, most scholars would be quick to reply that Cicero does matter; but when asked why this is the case, people might need to think a little more carefully. Presumably, then, different scholars (and ordinary readers) would give slightly different answers, depending on their background, experiences and expectations, as Cicero can be seen as still relevant from a variety of perspectives and for a variety of questions.

For his book Vittorio’s starting point is that far less has been written about Cicero than about other prominent figures of the eventful late Republican period in the first century BCE, such as Julius Caesar, despite Cicero’s significance in various contexts. Therefore, as Vittorio outlines in the introduction, in contrast to existing works, his book takes the following approach (14): “The book you are about to read is different from those listed above: this book is not about understanding Cicero in his historical, intellectual or philosophical context. . . . Instead this book is written from the point of view of the twenty-first century, and the predicament we find ourselves in today. This book is for readers who, like me, are concerned about the current state of affairs in global politics, where authoritarian far-right populists are all rallying against the foundations of our democratic practice. What all far-right politicians have in common is a commitment to the political philosophy of Caesarism.” The volume goes on to present several of Cicero’s major philosophical works and the ideas embedded in them or to be deduced from them; at the end it draws conclusions as to what can be inferred from this material for the situation in the modern world.

Using ancient philosophy as a guide through the confusing modern world has become quite popular, and there are now a range of self-help books based, for instance, on Stoic or Epicurean philosophy. Vittorio’s book could be linked to this trend to some extent, but its approach is different, as it is concerned with considering broader political questions affecting society, rather than addressing issues that individuals might face. This focus of Vittorio’s book is perhaps no coincidence and is in fact one reason why Cicero matters more to a range of people who have heard of him than other writers from the ancient world: Cicero was not just a (philosophical and political) writer, but also an active politician; and, obviously, there are still politicians in the modern world, although political systems nowadays differ from that in Republican Rome. Therefore, contemporary recipients of Cicero’s work and other material from the period of his lifetime can get a sense of Cicero as an active living being, relate more easily to Cicero’s activities and make comparisons with what they are currently experiencing in their own societies.

With a slight twist such a perspective applies to Classicists as well. Classicist readers, typically more focused on the literary and rhetorical texture of Cicero’s works, often also tell their students that Cicero matters, and they also come to this view because of Cicero’s political engagement; yet the reason for this assessment is usually not primarily Cicero’s political attitude (which some may question, depending on their view on ancient and/or modern politics), but rather his strategies and methods to achieve his goals. For, just like any politician in any period, over the course of his career, Cicero made a number of statements on controversial matters, in his case in the form of rhetorically elaborate speeches: in those orations Cicero manages to appear always as the one who outlines the “correct” opinion, is on top of everything, foresees future developments and acts in everyone’s best interest; by a careful selection and arrangement of material and a sometimes tendentious presentation he is able to convey this impression whatever the situation. Hence, Cicero’s speeches are effective and successful in almost all cases; at the same time one has to be aware that all of them serve a particular agenda and cannot be regarded as objective descriptions of facts.

Accordingly, reading Cicero’s speeches provides a sense of the shape and potential impact of effective oratory; moreover, critical and attentive engagement with these speeches can enhance the skills of checking arguments and assessing presentation style, which are of paramount importance for a critical evaluation of oratory and rhetoric, political and otherwise, in contemporary society. In the modern world, where political and commercial messaging via various channels is ubiquitous, such an exercise of carefully analyzing agenda-driven texts can help readers to become better equipped as citizens of modern states and to be enabled to deal with contemporary consumer-facing companies, since both politicians and companies intend to persuade audiences to adopt certain beliefs and to trust particular policies and products. Developing critical thinking skills of this kind and applying them to any source (primary or secondary) is an essential element of scholarly work in the humanities; the corresponding training develops a valuable life skill in the modern world, where assessing information, “fake news,” AI-generated content etc. is becoming ever more important.

Cicero’s works are a good example and training ground for developing expertise in assessing political communications, with the additional bonus that they educate readers about key political and philosophical ideas of the ancient world. For instance, after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, in the ensuing conflict with Mark Antony, Cicero believed that one should side with Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, and eliminate Mark Antony, to return to the traditional Roman Republic. While others were willing to negotiate with Antony, Cicero felt that negotiations would not be possible and not be successful in view of Mark Antony’s character and argued for immediate war against Mark Antony, as in his opinion the elimination of this individual was the only path to real and lasting peace. Whether or not this was the best strategy in that situation, this argument and the corresponding attitude raise a number of perennially relevant questions: Should war be avoided in any circumstances, or can it be justified on some occasions? Who decides what the criteria are for justifying war and for determining when they might apply? Is it appropriate to employ expert rhetoric to persuade people of actions that they would not naturally agree to, especially if these might have a lasting impact on their lives? How should information be shared and assessed? What is the relation between rhetorical appearance and substance?

Taking a more philosophical approach, in his new book Vittorio focuses on the content of Cicero’s politics and philosophy and its relevance for the modern world. These further observations from a Classicist perspective, which also considers the format in which ideas are conveyed, just demonstrate how thought-provoking and inspiring Vittorio’s book can be for readers from different backgrounds and show the potential of Vittorio’s stimulating approach to ask “why Cicero matters.” It turns out that in any case Cicero matters a lot since Cicero can matter for a range of reasons, depending on one’s perspective. As for why this is the case, Vittorio provides compelling reasons, which should encourage everyone to go back to Cicero’s works and read them for their intrinsic value and for the benefit to be drawn from them for life in the contemporary world.

Vittorio Bufacchi’s Why Cicero Matters is a timely and relevant book. A few highlights of the book are Bufacchi’s account of Cicero’s defense of mixed constitutions (73), his case that Cicero had noticed a problem with power concentration (130–132), and his observation that Cicero’s lack of class-understanding explains the trouble with his often tone-deaf political conservatism (120–121). These are all welcome insights. However, there are two sites of disagreement I have with Bufacchi’s case: first, the results of his “rescue one book” heuristic, and second, his reading of Cicero as a mitigated skeptic. These, as it turns out, are related disputes, and they matter because Cicero’s political views have a different valence when seen against a background of more radical Academic skepticism.

To start, Bufacchi uses a powerful technique to evoke the insights of one of Cicero’s masterworks, De Officiis. Bufacchi proposes the following “rescue one book” challenge with Cicero’s works: “. . . if one can rescue one book from the complete works of one author, . . . what would that magnum opus be?” (39–40). Again, Bufacchi’s answer is that De Officiis “best captures Cicero’s essence” (40). The book surveys Cicero’s vision of ethics, the good life, and most importantly our duties to truth as rational creatures and each other as citizens. I take no issue with Bufacchi’s admiration of De Officiis, as I share it. But I believe the comparative judgment tilts in favor of the Academica, and Cicero himself shares this viewpoint (see Aikin 2017). In On Divination, Cicero speaks of the Academica as his statement of his considered views on philosophical method and his account of the core of the pursuit of truth: “. . . in my Academicis Libris . . . I set forth the philosophic system which I thought least arrogant (arrogans) and at the same time most consistent and refined” (De Div 2.1). Cicero gives further methodological and ethical benefits that come from his statement in the Academic skeptical viewpoint:

“It is a considerable matter to understand any one of the systems of philosophy singly, how much harder it is to master them all! Yet this is the task that confronts those whose principle is to discover the truth by the method of arguing both for and against all the schools” (DND 1.11).

“. . . our New Academy allows us wide liberty so that it is within my right to defend any theory that presents itself to me as most probable” (De Officiis 3.21).

It is important that even in De Officiis that Cicero invokes his Academic bona fides, and it is here that Bufacchi sees the connection between a mitigated form of skepticism and Cicero’s political program bearing fruit: “. . . the biggest influence of the New Academy on Cicero’s philosophical outlook is the fact that Cicero does not seek certainty, instead he is satisfied with the probable” (48). On this Academic form of probabilism, Bufacchi sees Cicero endorsing not only a practical form of skepticism, but he frames Cicero’s orientation in provocative form as “the first (non) American pragmatist” (47).

The important assumption of Bufacchi’s proto-pragmatist reading of Cicero is that Cicero has endorsed views of duty, citizenship, and rational life. This is the mitigated skeptical approach—that though the skeptics see truth as hidden, the mitigated skeptic nevertheless has a self-conscious and fallibilist assent to what seems plausible. And thereby, they may act and act with a measure of confidence. This, I agree, is a very appealing reading of Cicero, taking his Academic bent to be a mature and practical anti-dogmatism. (In fact, I take it that there is much to take from the mitigated program in Academic skepticism—see Aikin 2023 for my take.)

My objection is that Cicero was not a mitigated skeptic. He goes to good lengths to contrast himself with Catullus, the expressly mitigated skeptic in the Academica (in particular at the end at 2.148), and he pauses to declare his allegiance to the more radical wing of the school with Clitomachus and Arcesilaus as exemplars in contrast to the mitigated wing:

As you know it is possible to perceive nothing but nevertheless opine, a view which Carneades is said to have approved; I personally believe Clitomachus rather than Philo or Metrodorus, and think that this view was advanced by him for the sake of argument rather than approval (Ac 2.78).

In essence, Cicero held that the mitigated skeptical program is a misunderstanding of Carneades’s dialectical strategy of arguing as though one could assent, but he was not doing so in propria persona. Cicero, despite appearances otherwise, was a radical Academic (for full cases for this, see Ribeiro 2022 and Reinhardt 2023).

This contrast between mitigated and radical Academic approaches matters, because this background reading of endorsements gives a different valence for readings of Cicero’s political works. Let us return to Cicero’s case for mixed constitutions. From the radical skeptical view, the cancelling forces set up between the forms of government (both for what they do when functioning well and when they are pathological) is a form of skeptical opposition as political epistemology (see Aikin 2015 for this case). The Academic approach of pro-et-contra is a centerpiece for political deliberation, and Cicero takes it as a necessary condition for responsible reflection on policy:

[I]n an attack on any institution, it is unfair to omit all mention of its advantages, and enumerate only its disadvantages, picking out its special shortcomings. (De Legibus 3.23)

Cicero darkly intones in his Republic that the design of the state must take into account that the facts of factionalism and conflicts of interest yield the result that “the essential nature of the commonwealth often defeats reason” (De Rep ii.58). The best hope, the optimistic Scipio replies, is an ideal statesman, “a man of good sense who rides upon the monstrous beast [of the state] . . . and guides by gentle word or touch” (De Rep ii.67). Of course, to this, the skeptical Philus asks: are there ever any ideal statesmen? Have there ever been any? (De Rep iii.7–8). The republic must be designed to last in light of the fact that it is most likely run by non-ideal statesmen!

In a similar skeptical vein, I’ll close by turning to Bufacchi’s parallel between Cicero’s resistance to Caesarian populism and contemporary struggles with populist figures. Eliminating Caesar in the Roman context, in fact, hastened the Republic’s decline. This, of course, was against the backdrop of Sullan overreach and reforms and then Pompeyan overreach. But what alternatives do we have to the anti-Republican and anti-intellectualist tendencies we see today? Cicero is a model for critique, for sure, but is he a model of effective resistance or alternatives?

## References

Aikin, Scott (2017) “Ciceronian Academic Skepticism, Augustinian Anti-Skepticism, and the Argument from Second Place.” Ancient Philosophy 37 (2): 387–405.

Aikin, Scott (2023) “The Academic at the Crossroads.” Synthese 202 (6): 1–16.

Aikin, Scott (2015) “Citizen Skeptic.” Symposion 2 (3): 275–285.

Bufacchi, Vittorio (2023) Why Cicero Matters. London: Bloomsbury.

Reinhardt, Tobias (2023) Cicero’s Academici Libri and Lucullus: A Commentary with Introduction and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ribeiro, Brian (2022) “Cicero’s Aspirationalist Radical Skepticism in the Academica.” History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis 25 (2): 309–326.

I certainly agree with Vittorio Bufacchi: Cicero does matter.1 Fortunately, others are beginning to come around on this point as well.2,3 A major aspect of Bufacchi’s book that I particularly appreciated was the perhaps counter-intuitive suggestion that Cicero is always doing politics, even when he writes about what appear to be more personal aspects of moral philosophy. Bufacchi treats as “political,” in the broad sense of the word, Ciceronian works like De Officiis and De Re Publica, but also De Amicitia and De Senectute, even though the subject matter of the latter two (friendship and aging) at first glance appears to be in an altogether different category from that of the first two (the duties of the statesman and the structure of a good state).

What I am particularly interested in here is to explore the possibility that Cicero, directly or indirectly, may be able to fill a sometimes presumed lacuna in the philosophy of Stoicism: the fact that the Stoics seem to have been relatively unconcerned with political philosophy, as distinct from personal ethics. The reason we may want to turn to Cicero in particular in this respect is because, even though he professed allegiance to the Skeptical phase of Plato’s Academy, he was, shall we say, Stoic-curious, or Stoic-adjacent.

True, he certainly criticized the Stoic system as a whole, for instance in book IV of De Finibus, and he launched a scorching attack against the Stoic credence in divination and allied practices in De Divinatione. But he also understood Stoic ethics very well, in book III of De Finibus, and commented favorably on it in both Paradoxa Stoicorum and Tusculanae Disputationes. Most crucially for the subject matter at hand, he tells us explicitly in De Officiis that part of that work was directly inspired by a now lost treaty by the middle Stoic Panaetius: “Our Panaetius himself, for example, whom I am following, not slavishly translating, in these books” (De Officiis, II.60).

In order to take seriously the possibility that Cicero’s political philosophy may be of help to the Stoics, we need to explain why the concern arises in the first place. According to Vander Waerdt,4 the ancient Stoics shied away from proposing any practical political agenda, contenting themselves with an analysis of the hypothetical life in accordance to nature that only a community of sages could actually implement. And since the sages are, famously, as rare as the Ethiopian phoenix . . .

This is by no means a consensus opinion. For instance Erskine,5 in a book criticized by Vander Waerdt, advances the thesis that beginning with Zeno of Citium the Stoics reacted to the political milieu of their time, reasonably suggesting that Stoic philosophical reflections were conditioned by the societal values and beliefs in which the Stoics themselves operated. Regardless of the dispute, both Erskine and Vander Waerdt agree that Zeno’s Republic was a direct response to Plato’s book by the same title, as was, a few centuries later, Cicero’s De Re Publica. Although strictly speaking only the latter focused on a concrete political program, all three are squarely concerned with what we would today call political philosophy.

Although Vander Waerdt is skeptical of the notion that Zeno’s Republic was actually concerned with anything but an ideal community of sages, the same author recognizes that his depiction of a very limited Stoic political philosophy applies only to the early Stoics, especially Zeno and Chrysippus. Later members of the Stoa, by contrast, beginning already with Diogenes of Babylon (the Stoa’s fifth scholar), sought to develop practical political philosophical accounts akin to those of the Platonists and Peripatetics, including a concern with discussing and ranking different systems of government: “Thus it appears that Diogenes and Panaetius were the two Stoics who provided an antecedent for Cicero’s own project of developing a Stoic political teaching comparable to Plato’s.” (207)

Another scholar who is somewhat skeptical of the very existence of Stoic political philosophy is David Sedley.6 In a paper focused on the ethics of tyrannicide and the particular case of Brutus and Cassius, he mentions a philosophical “test” of sort used by Brutus to recruit co-conspirators for the assault on Julius Caesar. Here is how Plutarch explains:

“For of his other friends too, Brutus excluded Statilius the Epicurean and Favonius the lover of Cato [i.e., a Stoic]. This was because, when in the course of joint philosophical dialectic he indirectly, in a roundabout way, put them to such a test, Favonius replied that civil war was worse than a law-flouting monarchy, while Statilius said that it was not proper conduct for one who was wise and intelligent to take on risks and worries on account of people who were bad and foolish.”7

Setting aside the Epicurean response, Sedley takes the Stoic position to be reflective of the broader view that the type of government is an “indifferent,” meaning that it does not make a difference to one’s character, which is the only thing of true value in Stoic philosophy. Indeed, whatever system of government we happen to live under is more grist to the mill of our virtue. Sedley then adds: “Lawless monarchy, Plato had said, is the hardest of all regimes to live with.” (49) All the better to exercise one’s virtue, I guess.

The case can be made, however, that actual Stoics, at least, were very much politically involved, often suffering extreme consequences for their choices. One example is that of Gaius Blossius (2nd century BCE), a student of Antipater of Tarsus and a Stoic who was supportive of the famous Tribune of the Plebes Tiberius Gracchus in his attempt at implementing land reform.8 After Tiberius was assassinated, Gaius went to Asia and joined a revolt against Roman domination led by Eumenes III of Pergamon. Gaius committed suicide after the uprising was put down by the Romans.

Then we have the famous case of Cato the Younger,9 a contemporary of Cicero and a major opponent of Julius Caesar. After fighting Caesar for years on the floor of the Senate, Cato took up arms on behalf of the Republican cause once Caesar fatefully crossed the Rubicon river with one of his legions, thus declaring war on the Senate. Cato too eventually committed suicide, in order not to be captured and used for political purposes by his arch-enemy.

And of course there is the well known Stoic opposition,10 a group of Stoic senators and philosophers who challenged what they perceived to be the tyrannies of the emperors Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian. Several of these are mentioned by name by both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Sedley dismisses them in this fashion: “The so-called ‘Stoic opposition’ of figures like Thrasea Paetus and Helvidius Priscus, despite their reverence for the memory of Brutus and Cassius, showed little if any interest in the assassination of emperors, and much more in courting a heroic death by the exercise of unbridled free speech.” (50) Nevertheless, they did seem to be clearly motivated politically, both about exercising their free speech and about challenging tyrannical governments.

So this is the question for Bufacchi: to what extent is it possible to recover a somewhat coherent picture of Stoic political philosophy, one that perhaps contradicts Waerdt’s and Sedley’s skeptical takes, on the basis of Cicero’s writings? I assume this project would have to start with the most explicitly Stoic of Cicero’s political treatises, De Officiis. But perhaps useful insights could be gleaned also from the rest of Cicero’s writings on politics and, more broadly, from his Stoic-friendly essays?

As a classicist writing in a philosophy publication about a book that crosses disciplinary boundaries and the boundary between academic and popular writing, I feel it’s valuable to contextualise my response with more information about my own position—especially given the complexity of Ciceronian studies. The writings of Cicero are extensive both in quantity and in terms of genre; his extensive surviving correspondence means we know more about him than about any other Greco-Roman historical figure. My primary specialism has been his judicial oratory; most of this is firmly embedded in politics, but my focus has been on rhetorical and grammatical structures (Fotheringham 2013a). I have a secondary interest in how modern “pop culture” artefacts—from Anthony Trollope’s 1880 biography to the novels of Robert Harris (2006, 2009, 2015)—have used the enormous amount of information available in constructing their pictures of Cicero (Fotheringham 2013b). I am painfully conscious that his philosophical writings constitute a gap in my knowledge.

Why Cicero Matters (WCM) both is and is not for me. Although I learned a lot about Cicero’s philosophical writings from the book, I am obviously not the “student . . . looking for something to read on [Cicero],” mentioned on pp. 1, 11 & 142. On the other hand, students are not the only intended audience (e.g. “broader public,” viii; “ordinary decent citizens,” 12); student readers are mentioned considerably less often than the political goal of the book (which I find highly congenial):

At this particular moment in time, the rehabilitation of Cicero as an antidote to the myth of the strong man of history feels urgent, and important: this book is an effort in this endeavour. (11; cf. 12, 14, 15, 36–37, 110, 133, 142—and many places echoing rather than stating the point)

But perhaps my interest in pop-culture reception is more significant, making WCM, for me, not so much a book to learn from or to (dis)agree with as one to analyse: to set within its own publication context and that of Cicero’s reception more widely, and to pull apart structurally and linguistically in order to figure out how it’s working.

WCM is part of “Why Philosophy Matters,” described on the publisher’s website as “an exciting series of short and accessible books showcasing the importance of philosophical thought to contemporary concerns” (Bloomsbury 2024; my emphasis). Vittorio Bufacchi describes himself as specialising in social injustice, human rights and political violence; he has plenty of experience in writing for a popular audience, with an impressively long list of opinion articles and newspaper publications on his c.v. (Bufacchi n.d.). This experience shows throughout WCM, which is an engaging read. Bufacchi’s authorial persona is prominent in a way that is restricted to the prefaces in his more academic books (Bufacchi 2007, 2011): relaxed and humorous, but also showing passionate conviction. If I were asking my students to analyse WCM as a piece of popular writing, I would expect them to note (among other things) the use of colloquialisms (e.g. “sounds daft,” 19; “Hegel was star-struck,” 32; “one of the hottest political ideas,” 59), pop-culture references (e.g. Squid Game, 25; Desert Island Discs, 39; the novels of Sally Rooney, 79; Monty Python, 110), and the way most chapters don’t begin directly with Cicero’s philosophy but lead into the ancient material from a (sometimes light-hearted) tangent.

WCM is the only book in the series (so far) to tackle an ancient philosopher, arguably giving Bufacchi an extra difficulty in needing to explain Cicero’s historical context—to which his political philosophy is inextricably connected. But Bufacchi seems to relish the task of explaining Roman history and culture. The text moves smoothly between such explanations, Cicero’s political philosophy, and contextualisation of that philosophy in western political thought from Hobbes to the present day. A slight difference in the treatments of Roman history and history of philosophy is evident in the fact that, while the role and relevance of Roman historical figures is almost always carefully explained, the text includes unexplained, unfootnoted, sometimes rather “throwaway” references to famous philosophers (e.g. Adam Smith, 20; Ayn Rand, 40; Rousseau, 86). In terms of expected audience-knowledge, to the extent that Bufacchi does have student-readers in mind, they are philosophy rather than ancient history students.

Of the two ancient subjects covered in WCM, Cicero’s philosophy has only minimal coverage in popular culture, whereas the history of the late Republic has far too much to be dealt with in detail here. Despite the rehabilitation of Cicero’s philosophical reputation within the Academy over the last quarter-century (see Schofield 2021: 7–9), there have been, as far as I know, no popular books devoted to his philosophy. Schofield 2021 and Maso 2022 are obviously aimed at classicists; there is nothing in the “For Beginners” or “Very Short Introductions” book series (For Beginners 2023, OUP 2024). A recent Google search turned up several web-pages introducing Cicero’s philosophy that recycle the old dismissals of it as mere ventriloquism of the Greek writers, but almost as many where that judgement is rejected—so the word is gradually getting out.

Claims for the modern relevance of Cicero’s work are relatively thin on the ground, especially in contrast to the popular revival of Stoicism; this tends to focus on self-improvement rather than politics, although the movement appeals, worryingly, to numerous writers of the “manosphere” who would happily exclude women and non-whites from political activity (see Zuckerberg 2018: ch. 2 for both aspects). I am aware of a small number of on-line articles arguing for Cicero’s contemporary relevance, mostly on conservative/libertarian sites (Nicgorski 2011, Meany 2018, several articles at FEE n.d.; exceptions: articles at Voegelin View 2024). Bufacchi argues against viewing Cicero as a conservative pure and simple (75, 88, 111), but has to acknowledge the limits on his egalitarianism: this is foreshadowed at 52 but only discussed in detail—along with other “failings”—in the final numbered chapter (118–120). My own instinct would have been to deal with these limitations earlier in the book, explaining them as inevitable in such an ancient thinker, rather than risk undercutting earlier claims when “coming clean” at the end. But I do not have Bufacchi’s experience in writing for a popular readership.

On the political history side, WCM’s picture of Cicero battling a series of “authoritarian populists”—Catiline, Clodius, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony and Octavian/Augustus—is tailored to support Bufacchi’s comparison of the crisis of the late Republic to the current crisis in democracy, and his argument that Cicero is a better role model for modern readers than Caesar. The simplification of a complex political situation is unsurprising in a popular and to some extent polemical work, in which the politics are only a backdrop to Cicero’s philosophy. The period has been interpreted in so many different ways that it is impossible to do more here than mention a couple of themes. Bufacchi is surely right that Caesar is more widely known than Cicero (2, 4–7, 36), and that positive evaluations of Cicero have been in the minority in the last couple of centuries at least (30, 36). In Fotheringham 2013b, I covered a range of attitudes to Cicero, and noted that the judgement passed on him is often linked—and opposed—to that passed on Caesar (cf. WCM 32–33). Bufacchi acknowledges a debt to Robert Harris’s trilogy of novels (xi), which I noted as being unusually Cicero-centric and Cicero-friendly.

I have quibbles, of course! (I am an academic, after all . . .) I would avoid the term “authoritarian populism” as risking the importation of modern ideas that do not match the categories appropriate to the period. The prime source for WCM’s pictures of Cicero’s enemies is Ciceronian invective, which we should be extremely careful about taking at face value. And one of my feelings about Harris’s novels can also be applied to WCM:

It is a pity that in presenting this humane and realistic portrait of Cicero, Harris feels it necessary to demonize Caesar. (Fotheringham 2013b: 369–370)

To Bufacchi’s considerable bibliography, I would add Yavetz 1971 on the range of historians’ interpretations of Caesar’s career and intentions; Morstein-Marx 2021 is a recent biography arguing that Caesar was not aiming at autocracy.

But many of these quibbles are due to the fact that, as a specialist in the period, my emphasis tends to be on its complexity, on the difficulty of really knowing it—whereas for the purposes of this book, Bufacchi has to simplify. But he too is an academic, and his awareness of complexity sometimes surfaces, e.g. when he acknowledges “taking some poetic licence with the historical figure of Cicero” (112). When he critiques those convinced of the certainty of their position (118), is there another hint that the apparent certainty of previously stated judgements should be taken with a grain of salt? There is certainly an echo of Bufacchi’s earlier discussion of Cicero’s skeptical and pragmatist approach to truth (44–46). Not being a philosopher, however, I don’t dare get into a discussion of “truth,” historical or otherwise . . .

WCM has shown me a new picture of Cicero, and opened my eyes to the possibility of claiming (parts of) his work for a more progressive politics.

## Bibliography

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