Cicero’s Plato and Aristotle

Abstract The aim of this chapter is to approach Cicero’s philosophical work by studying his assessments and use of Plato and Aristotle. That could, of course, be a topic for a whole book.1 As assessed by Cicero, Plato and Aristotle constitute between them all that is best in philosophy, both in their own right and by the traditions they established via their successors in the Academy and the Lyceum. Merely translating their ‘superhuman talents’ (‘divina ingenia’), he says, would be a patriotic service (Fin. I. 7). Cicero even called the two gymnasia of his Tusculan villa by these names.2 So an adequate account of Cicero’s Plato and Aristotle, it might seem, would have to incorporate the main part of Cicero’s philosophical writings. In fact, those works are primarily concerned with postAristotelian or Hellenistic philosophy. Aristotle, and especially Plato, were more to Cicero than great names from the past, but their philosophies per se were not major talking-points during his lifetime. By including Plato and Aristotle in his philosophical corpus, Cicero was less concerned with their individual doctrines than with the general impetus they had given to the subject, their diffused influence as expressed by the terms Academici and Peripatetici, and their literary distinction.