Living with Shakespeare by Susannah Carson

Author:Susannah Carson [Carson;, Susannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-74340-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

ROMAN MATTERS AND MANNERS

Rome was at a turning point. It was drifting from its republican past towards an imperial future under the authoritarian rule of the Caesars, and under the pressure of the moment, cracks were starting to appear in the political ideology and intellectual ideals of the Roman elite.

That elite looked back several centuries to the great democracies of ancient Greece for its political and intellectual origins. Athens in the time of Plato (427–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the model.a While children, foreign workers, slaves, and women were all excluded from citizenship, all resident adult male Athenians were citizens of the polis, so the simplest baker and the smartest banker each had one vote. Their political freedom had its intellectual counterpart: philosophy in Athens flourished as its practitioners used their freedom to think against the grain. That spirit of free-thinking is encapsulated in a proverbial phrase attributed to Aristotle, “Plato is my friend but a greater friend is truth,” which runs through a book I wrote recently about one particular chapter in the history of free-thinking.b Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, of course, so, in uttering that pithy phrase, he was claiming, above all, the freedom to disagree with his philosophy teacher. But, in making such a claim, he was appealing to an underlying principle of the Athenian polity.

The principle of freedom became a cornerstone of the Roman republic. Rome was not the democracy that Athens had been, but citizens had voting rights, and the philosophically minded were free to ally themselves with a particular school of thought or to pick and mix ideas in an eclectic philosophy of their own making. Roman philosophy of the first century BCE bristles with “-isms” from the Greek world, most notably Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism, and each turns out, on closer scrutiny, to contain a spectrum of competing tendencies. You can see why scholars of this period have their work cut out!

The first of the “-isms” just mentioned, Stoicism, is the philosophy most visibly present in Julius Caesar. It came down to Shakespeare from this period in two differing versions, thanks to its most influential mediators, Cicero (106–43 BCE) and Seneca (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE). Cicero and Seneca both portray it as an ideal moral attitude of reasoned conduct in the service of the truth and of cultivated indifference towards life’s turmoils.

That is the essence of Roman Stoicism as it pervades Julius Caesar. Nonetheless, there are significant differences of emphasis and attitude between Cicero and Seneca in their presentations of Stoicism, and these differences matter because they reveal Roman ways of thinking as Shakespeare dramatizes them in his play.c Cicero presents Stoicism as a framework for the civic virtues of consistency, honour, and public service: the Ciceronian Stoic faultlessly performs on the Roman stage the role in life that has been given to him. Seneca, writing after Cicero, emphasizes the more heroic virtues of constancy, steadfastness, and invulnerability: the Senecan Stoic, when faced with the worst, remains ever true to his own likeness.

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