Cicero’s Advice for Public Officials
The Roman statesman and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43BC), is remembered as one of the foremost of the great Roman orators. His surviving letters and works on ethics, politics, religion, and rhetoric, have exercised a profound influence on many of the most distinguished leaders in the history of the world. Cicero became a successful lawyer, but his political career saw only sporadic triumphs in a turbulent period of Roman history. His ambition and ability enabled him to achieve honours normally reserved for the sons of aristocratic Roman families, and he was elected Praetor in the year 66, and Consul three years later. But his enduring fame rests squarely on his astonishing abilities as a populariser of the great ideas of the ancient world, taking the treasures of Greek philosophy in particular, and rendering them accessible to a wider readership. The excerpt below demonstrates aspects of the classic wisdom that could help restore trust and virtue in our deeply troubled world.
“The essential thing in all public business and service is to avoid incurring even the smallest suspicion of greed. Gaius Pontius the Samnite once declared: “If only Fortune had postponed my birth until an epoch in which the Romans would begin to accept bribes! For then I should have been able to stop their empire from surviving for one single day longer.”
“Yes, and he would have had to wait for many centuries too. For it is only recently that this curse has begun to plague our national affairs. So, if Pontius was as formidable a man as he seems to have been, I am greatly relieved that he lived then rather than now.
“Less than a hundred and ten years have passed since Lucius Piso passed his law to punish illicit gains; previously no such enactment had existed. From that time onward there has been a multitude of similar measures, each stricter than the last. A whole host of people have been put on trial and condemned.
“Because of the fear of what the courts would do next, a horrible Italian war has been fought. And then the law courts were suppressed, and the laws with them; and our subject allies were pillaged and plundered, one and all. The result of this whole series of events is that whatever strength we may still possess is no longer owed to any merits of our own. We owe it to the weakness of others.
“Panaetius praises the younger Scipio Africanus because he was not grasping in public life. And the praise is fully justified. Nevertheless, one could think of even greater personal virtues to attribute to Africanus, because the credit for this particular quality, his self-restraint, belongs not to himself but to the age he lived in.
“When Lucius Paullus, for example, gained possession of the entire great wealth of Macedonia, he brought so much money into our treasury that his spoils, the spoils of one single general alone, made it possible to do away with the property tax for everyone. Into his own home, on the other hand, Paullus brought no new possessions at all – apart from everlasting renown.
“His son, the younger Africanus, copied his example; when he overthrew Carthage, there was no profit for himself. As for his fellow censor, Lucius Mummius, he too, after destroying the richest city upon earth, emerged not a penny the richer. He was ambitious to adorn, not his own house, but Italy. And by this very attitude, so it seems to me, he did, in fact, adorn his own house in the most glorious way conceivable - humility.
“As I was saying before, the nastiest vice in the whole world is greed, and when this occurs in prominent citizens and leaders of the government, it is nastiest of all. To use affairs of state for one’s personal gain is not only immoral, it is a sin and a crime. Apollo declared through his Pythian oracle that the only thing that could bring down Sparta’s power was greed, and his prophecy applies to all other successful nations as well. The best way for their rulers to win goodwill is by exercising self-restraint and self-denial.
“When politicians, enthusiastic to pose as the people’s friends, bring forward bills providing for the redistribution of land, they intend that the existing owners should be driven from their homes. Or they propose to excuse borrowers from paying back their debts. Men with those views undermine the very foundations on which our commonwealth depends…
“All politicians who harbour such intentions are aiming a fatal blow at the whole principle of justice; for once rights of property are infringed, this principle is totally undermined. It is, I repeat, the special function of every state and every city to guarantee that each of its citizens shall be allowed the free and unrestricted enjoyment of his own property.