Transcript for Interview with Katharina Volk on Cicero & Caesar

0. Introduction

Before I die, I'd like to have lived both the contemplative and active life. A life dedicated to understanding the world, but also to shaping it. And that's quite a tall order today. Because on one hand, you have academics who are increasingly specialized and mostly writing for other specialists. And on the other hand, you have the elite, business people, politicians, celebrities, who are probably the least cultured elite we've ever had. Go look at Harvard's entrance exams just a 100 years ago, or look at one of Lincoln's speeches and you'll see what I mean.

But this wasn't always the case. There were times when these two paths were much closer coupled, and one such time is the late Roman Republic. People like Cicero and Caesar weren't just the leading political figures of their day, but also the leading intellectuals. And let me be clear, they weren't writing lightweight, popular books like the self-congratulatory memoirs our elites write. They wrote serious treaties and epic poems. They covered statecraft, ethics, oratory. Their intellectual contributions actually dwarfed those of the full-time intellectuals of their day.

My guest today is one of the world's top classicists, Katharina Volk. And she'll help us understand what made this combination of action and contemplation possible by sharing with us the incredible intellectual lives of Cicero and Caesar.

What I found most striking in her portrait is the incredible congruency between their ideas and their lives. Caesar, for example, was a rational, direct, and blunt man. And you see this reflected in his writing style. It's terse. It's to the point. There's little embellishment. Caesar composed a landmark treatise on Latin grammar, where he argued for strict rules even if they went against conventional uses of language. And you see the same in his political actions. Crossing the Rubicon, his calendar reforms, declaring himself dictator for life, he was willing to disrupt convention and impose upon it a new order. By the way, Caesar composed that treatise in the heat of a military campaign when he was leading an army across the Alps. So if nothing else, I found the consistency between their ideas, politics, and character esthetically beautiful. And I hope you will, too.

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1. Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic

Johnathan Bi: So your book, The Roman Republic of Letters, is focusing on the intellectual as well as political elite on the Roman Republic. And what's crazy about these times is that the political elite had significant overlap with the intellectual elite. It was people like not only Cicero, who we already consider as somewhat of an intellectual, but people like Caesar, Brutus, and Cato. These people were not just the political leaders, as we think of them, but they were the intellectual elite of the time as well. Is that right? 

Katharina Volk: That's correct, yes.

Johnathan Bi: So let me give you a quote, which I think is one of the most fascinating stories in your entire book. This is about Brutus when he's trying to get conspirators to assassinate Caesar.

I quote to you your book:

Brutus submitted potential co-conspirators to a covert aptitude test by involving them in a general philosophical discussion about the role of the wise man in a law-flouting monarchy. Both Favonius and Stetilius flunked the test by maintaining, respectively, that civil war was worse than tyranny and that the wise man would not expose himself to danger for the benefit of a stupid multitude. Only Labeo, who disagreed with both, was taken into Brutus’ confidence and made a member of the team. It is remarkable that decisions about a political assassination were taken in the context of a joint philosophical debate among Roman senators.

(Katharina Volk, The Roman Republic of Letters)

These are the types of events that we are seeing in this period.

Katharina Volk: Right, that's true. There you see that when we're talking about the intellectual activities of these people, we're not just talking about some sort of leisure time, read a book in your villa, cultural capital, show how learned you are by displaying beautiful Greek statues or something like this. But we're talking about, in this case, philosophy as something that is actually shaping the ethical decision of individuals, and in this case, major political events.

So what we see in the middle of the first century BCE is indeed a great cultural flourishing at Rome. And I think there are a number of sort of developments that are coming together. Rome has been growing in power in the Mediterranean for centuries. They have been very much influenced by Greek literature, also for a long time. But it is sort of at this period that Rome and Roman writing and Roman thought is sort of coming into its own. And that the upper classes to which Cicero belonged are really embracing culture, including Greek culture in a way that is just sort of becoming second nature.

And this was also the time, a time really when Roman writing and especially Roman prose writing reached a new level of excellence. And indeed, Cicero and Caesar were the two masters of the Latin language that really shaped the form of Latin writing for years to come. And even today, because if you learn Latin in school, what you learn is the Latin of Cicero and Caesar.

Johnathan Bi: And this is why I'm so excited to discuss your book and why I found the times that your book captured so captivating is because when we look today at the active and the contemplative life, they're pulled very much far apart. The only serious intellectuals I would wager are people like yourself in the academy. And that has become extremely specialized, abstract and often disjointed from political or practical concerns. And then you have, people who live the life of action. These are the businessmen, the politicians.

And you can't imagine our businessmen, CEOs and politicians today, gathering people in a platonic dialogue asking, say, “what is the nature of taxation” right? That's just something impossible today. So why has the contemplative and active life drifted so far apart in our age? And what enabled the top men of action to also be the great intellectuals of their age?