a firm follower in Seneca (below, pp. 663 f), and his ultimate heirs were the Latin Church Fathers. 'Latin
philosophy, which before him was rough and ready, he polished by his eloquence', wrote a
contemporary. He himself, in explaining how he could write so many books so quickly, says to Atticus:
'They are only copies and involve little effort; only the words are mine, of which I have a copious store.'
There were Epicureans and Stoics who wrote in Latin before him, but they themselves, he says, made no
pretension to stylistic elegance or even definition and arrangement. Though Cicero here exaggerates his
role as a mere translator, which he elsewhere denies, there is no doubt that most of the evidence for his
taking pains concerns not the meaning of the Greek doctrines but the choice of interlocutors and the
problems of vocabulary. It was Cicero who fixed the correlation between Greek technical terms and the
Latin word or words used to render them, because he was more interested in instructing all educated
readers than in preaching to the converted. Not only does he often give the Greek original: he often
discusses alternative translations and changes his mind in later works.
Before and after Cicero, it was common to complain of the deficiencies of Latin as a philosophical
language. Cicero protested, with some justice, that new subjects in any language require the creation of
new words, and that Greek philosophers too had resorted to neologisms. He himself introduced, for
example, qualitas, moralis, and beatitudo, for 'quality', 'moral', and 'happiness' (it is suggestive that
Rome, left to herself, needed no word for happiness). But though he patriotically maintained that Latin
was potentially richer than Greek, it had certain fundamental limitations that were particularly serious
for philosophical exposition: Latin was inhospitable to compound words, and it lacked the definite
article. As Seneca was to complain, '"Quod est" is a feeble substitute for Plato's to on,' ('that which
exists'). Cicero often resorted to periphrasis, especially as he was aiming for eloquence, which meant
respecting the genius of the language. 'We do not need to translate word for word, as unstylish
translators do', he writes. The same consideration lead to the more irritating habit of translating Greek
technical terms differently in different places, or by pairs of words, in accordance with his normal style.
Nonetheless, his achievement was immense. His greatest pagan successor, Seneca, though he added
many new terms of his own to the Latin philosophical vocabulary, almost never rejected one of Cicero's
translations: they permanently enlarged the resources of Latin.
That such a self-conscious stylist should also leave behind the most spontaneous personal letters may at
first seem paradoxical. But it was part of Cicero's consummate talent for finding the right style for each
occasion. The letters include official dispatches to the Senate on military affairs in his province which
are quite different, in their formal simplicity, from the witty and entertaining picture of his duties that he
gives his young friend Caelius, or the irritable coldness with which he addresses his inconsiderate
predecessor Appius Claudius, or the bitter and anxious confidences he makes to his friend Atticus. The
letters not only show us Cicero's literary versatility and the intricacies of Roman politics: they give us a
glimpse of cultivated and sophisticated society-marriages and dowries, divorce and bereavement,
property and investment, patronage and promotion, declamation and dinner parties. Above all, they
furnish us with a more candid and intimate picture of an individual than we shall meet again until
Marcus Aurelius and St Augustine.
Cicero's place in the political, military, and social history of Rome is not as secure as his place in
cultural history. It is true that he held the major magistracies, that he suppressed a serious social revolt in