Cicero and the Gods of Natural Law

His daughter Tullia dies in February, 45 BCE.

She is thirty, recently divorced, having survived the childbirth that the baby did not survive. Cicero is devastated in a way that surprises even his enemies — the great orator, the man who has stood before the Senate and spoken for the Roman republic with such force that the Senate acted, the man who has written twenty years of legal and philosophical and political Latin that will still be read two thousand years later, is destroyed by a private death.

He retreats to his villa at Tusculum. He writes. He cannot stop writing. He writes a consolation for his own grief that does not survive. He writes three dialogues on the nature of the gods. He writes on divination and on fate. The output is enormous — in the year between Tullia’s death and his own murder, Cicero writes what will become the foundational texts of Latin philosophical theology.

He writes because writing is what he does when the world makes no sense, and in 45 BCE the world makes no sense. His daughter is dead. Caesar is dictator. The Republic for which he has fought his entire political life is functionally over. He has nothing useful left to do except think as carefully as he can.

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De Natura Deorum presents three views of the gods.

The Epicurean view: the gods exist but care nothing for humans. They dwell in the spaces between worlds in perfect tranquility, unmoved by prayer or sacrifice, neither rewarding the good nor punishing the wicked. Worship of them is practically pointless and theoretically misleading.

The Stoic view: the gods exist and are identical with the rational order of the universe. Jupiter is not a man with thunderbolts on Olympus; Jupiter is the principle of divine reason that permeates and organizes all of nature. Divination works because the cosmos is a single organism whose parts communicate with each other. Prayer works because the rational principle is responsive to rational appeal.

The Academic Skeptic view (Cicero’s own official position): we cannot know. The arguments for and against divine existence and divine concern for humans are evenly balanced. The wise man suspends judgment on the metaphysical question while maintaining traditional religious practice, because traditional practice is the social fabric of the city and destroying it without a replacement is reckless.

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De Divinatione is more unsettling.

His brother Quintus argues, in the first book, that divination works — that the evidence for Roman augury, haruspicy, dreams, and oracles is too extensive to dismiss, that the Stoic cosmic-sympathy argument accounts for it rationally. Cicero, in the second book, systematically demolishes these arguments. He points out that the hit rate of oracles is no better than chance. He notes that augury has become a political instrument — magistrates take auspices when they want to delay a vote and find favorable ones when they want to proceed. He asks why the gods would communicate through the entrails of sheep rather than simply speaking clearly.

He ends by saying that he is not attacking the state religion — he is defending it. A state religion based on rational natural theology, stripped of fraud and superstition, would be stronger than one based on augural technicalities and haruspical performance. The truth of Roman religion is in the civic practice, not in the specific claims about divine communication.

This is a dangerous argument to have made in writing. If the augurs know their procedures are largely theater, and the Senate knows it, and now Cicero has said it in a dialogue that will be copied across the Roman world — what holds the procedures in place?

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He never finishes De Legibus.

It is incomplete when he is killed in December 43 BCE. The agents of Mark Antony — who appears on every list Cicero has put of Rome’s corrupt political enemies — catch him on the road south from Rome, escaping after the Senate’s amnesty has been revoked. They cut off his head. They cut off his hands — the hands that wrote the Philippics that targeted Antony.

The head and hands are brought to Rome and displayed on the Rostra — the speakers’ platform in the Forum from which Cicero gave the speeches that made him famous. Antony’s wife Fulvia is said to have taken a hairpin and stabbed through the dead tongue.

The man who had spent fifty years arguing that Rome was governed by something real — a divine rational order, a natural law that transcended the accidents of political fortune — died as an object lesson in the total non-governance of the world by anything resembling what he described.

He had already written that he did not know whether the gods existed. He died with the question unresolved. The De Natura Deorum survived him by two thousand years.

Perhaps that is the gods’ answer.